I need a 40-page PDF turned into an EPUB before my train tonight, but the formatting keeps breaking. Has anyone found a quick way to convert PDF to EPUB?
If it’s mostly text, open the PDF in Word, clean up the headings and paragraph styles, then paste it into Apple Pages and export as EPUB. Complex columns, footnotes, and tables usually need manual fixing because EPUB reflows everything. I learned that the hard way trying to preserve a rate sheet layout. For tonight, keep the design simple and check the EPUB on your phone before leaving.
Calibre does this in about two clicks, add the book, hit convert, pick EPUB. Fair warning though, PDFs are a page layout pretending to be text, so it breaks whenever there are tables or columns. If your 40 pages are mostly plain text you should exepct it to work fine.
How text heavy is the file?
If the PDF has selectable text, PDFcap is probably the quickest route: upload it, choose EPUB, then skim the result for headings, page numbers, and odd line breaks. If it’s a scanned PDF, run OCR first, meaning it reads the page images into text, or the EPUB will likely be messy.
The formatting breaks because a PDF stores text as positioned chunks, not flowing paragraphs, so any converter has to guess the reading order. For 40 pages the fastest route is opening it in Word, applying proper heading styles, then uploading the docx to Google Docs and downloading it as EPUB. You will still want a quick skim for stray line breaks, but that beats rebuilding it by hand.