EPUB to PDF Converter
Reads an EPUB in your browser, follows the spine in reading order, and writes the text and headings into a PDF. The styling and the images stay behind.
This tool needs JavaScript: the book is opened and converted in your browser, and it is never uploaded.
A5 is closer to a paperback and gives a more readable line length on a tablet.
Reading the book…
No book yet. The text, the headings and the lists come across in reading order; the styling, the images and the covers do not.
Turns an EPUB into a PDF without uploading it. The text, the headings and the lists come across in reading order; the styling, the images and the cover do not.
That is the honest scope. An EPUB is styled content — CSS, embedded fonts, floats, page breaks — and reproducing it means a layout engine. What people converting an EPUB usually want is to read it somewhere that only opens PDFs, and for that the text in the right order is the whole job.
How to use
Choose the .epub, or drop it on the box. Pick a page size — A5 is closer to a paperback and gives a better line length on a tablet — then download.
Example
A Short Book
9 chapters · 412 blocks · 38 pages · 96 KB
14 images left out, including any cover.The preview under that shows the first blocks in order with their heading levels, so you can check the spine was read the way you expected before downloading.
Pitfalls
This is a text conversion, not a facsimile. No CSS, no fonts from the book, no page furniture. A poetry collection or a technical book with figures will lose things that matter; a novel will not.
Images are left out, including the cover. They are still in the EPUB, and the count is reported so you know what is missing.
DRM-protected books cannot be read by anything but their reader. A book bought from a store with DRM is encrypted: the zip opens, the text does not. Stripping DRM is illegal in many places and this does not do it.
Latin script only. The PDF names the fonts every reader already has, which cover Latin script and common punctuation. Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Arabic and CJK come out as question marks, counted and reported. A book in those scripts needs an embedded font, which is a different tool.
Footnotes become ordinary paragraphs wherever they sit in the document, because in an EPUB they are links to a section at the end rather than anything anchored to the page.
Reading order comes from the spine, not the file names. That is correct, and it is why a book whose chapters convert in an odd order has an odd spine: the tool reports the count so you can tell.
A Kindle file is not an EPUB. MOBI, AZW and AZW3 are a different, proprietary format. Calibre converts one to EPUB, and this reads EPUBs.
Compatibility
Everything happens in your browser. The EPUB is opened with a zip reader written for this,
META-INF/container.xml names the package file, the package file’s spine gives the reading order, and
each document is XHTML read into blocks. The PDF is written by hand. Nothing is uploaded and nothing is
stored.
Tags map to structure: h1 to h6 become heading levels, li becomes a bullet, blockquote makes
everything inside it a quotation, pre becomes monospaced, and inline markup is flattened into the
paragraph text. script, style and nav are skipped, which is what keeps the table of contents out
of the body.
The PDF names the base fourteen fonts with WinAnsiEncoding, so nothing is embedded and the file stays small. Line breaking is measured with your browser’s own Helvetica, which is metrically compatible with the one the reader will use.
Limits: 60MB for the file.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my cover missing?
Can it convert a book I bought from Amazon or Kobo?
Will the page numbers match the ebook?
Why is the order odd?
What about the table of contents?
nav document of links that would convert to a page of bare titles. The
headings in the PDF are the structure worth keeping.