Convert an epub/ebook to searchable PDF - YMMV

DEVONthink Tips
1

Here is a procedure to convert epubs to searchable PDF’s. Epubs are by design ‘flowy’ and wordwrap to different screen sizes, and pdf’s aren’t. Therefore your results will be variable. It works better with documents with fewer images.

Use convertio.com to convert your file to word .docx. I’ve tried other web services and desktop software but convertio is the most reliable.

Open your .docx with pages - not Word. This is because pages uses apple’s PDFkit and produces apple’s flavor of searchable pdfs.

This is the point at which to make any corrections and modifications to your converted file. Hyperlinks tend not to survive but play around with them and layout, footnotes etc.

Export from pages to pdf.

Check your results in preview or DEVONthink.

Good luck
Sam

2

Thanks for the suggestion. Many people are using Calibre for ePubs and export PDFs from there. Unfortunately, the PDFs are not entirely kosher and can / do exhibit the issue where they are detected as having no text. Following this suggestion can alleviate this, as a post-process: For PDFs with text searchable in acrobat but not in Preview.

3

Yeah I tried calibre a lot - depending on the layout of the pdf Convertio handles it better… YMMV.
Thanks!