Pdf from Kindle to searchable PDF

[lacomaco]

Hi, I am now saving all my Amazon books into pdfs (if my account is lost then 1500 books are gone). The conversion provides a pdf with 1-2 Mb size but they are nor searchable. When I tried to convert 1 into a searchable pdf via OCR from right/click, the size of the file goes up from 1,5Mb to 41.1Mb… What could be the problem? Conversion would be good but if the size multiplies by 30 times then it will take too much space

Thanks!

[chrillek]

Dramatically increased size of PDF after OCR

I’m using Office version to convert Scanned PDF (about 30-50 MB) to PDF+Text to make them searchable. However, after the process, the resulting PDF is about 3x size! I did for 2 of my zillion scanned PDF and found 44 MB to 150 MB and 32 MB to 120 MB… I know embedding text will increase the size, but not 3x or even more! I tried PDF Toolkit to reduce the size but seems I only can do it losing quality, that is a thing I don’t want. What I wonder is the 44 MB PDF size has the same visual quality…

[BLUEFROG]

What kind of files and converting by what means?

[rfog]

As 2025 and latest DT Pro version, I think this is solved and DT generates good size/quality PDFs selecting “Compress PDF” option. However, macOS PDF engine lacks a lot of other important not solved (and increasing) bugs, like no support of soft-hyphened words, Unicode cursive words, and typograhic ligatures. Those bugs are present in almost all macOS, iOS and iPadOS PDF tools except PDF Expert. Absurdily, almost any Windows PDF tool (even Microsoft Edge itself) work fine with those.

As today, to have barely usable non-trivial generated PDF in macOS/iOS (and by extension in DT/DTTG), you must remove soft-hypens, end-of-line-hyphened words, font ligatures from any generated PDF. Calibre (the eBook viewer) with extensions can do it except ligatures.

Currently I use a Windows virtual machine with Abbyy FineReader 15 OCR Editor to generate very thin scanned PDF and to correct other PDFs. And normally, MS Word printed-to-PDF documents should work fine in macOS (and DT) if they aren’t hyphened, but as a matter of FYI:

**

Don’t open or manage any PDF with macOS Preview. Even opening a PDF with this crap will break a lot of things inside.

**

AFAIK, opening and reading them inside DT is safe, but not annotate or modify them, as DT uses the macOS PDF Framework.

The only safe tool I’ve found in macOS is PDF Expert, that BTW I hate with my entire soul, but I’m using as it is The-Only-One.

[lacomaco]

I use Epubor, the origin files are usually kfx / awz and Epubor converts them to only pdf (no option to convert to pdf + text).

[BLUEFROG]

Can you open a support ticket and attach a PDF produced by Epubor?