What an e-book keeps when it becomes pages
An EPUB has no pages of its own. Its text reflows to whatever screen opens it, which is why it reads well on a phone and awkwardly on paper. Making a PDF fixes the text to a page size you pick, so it can be printed, marked up in a PDF reader or kept as a copy that looks the same everywhere.
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Which tool you need
A book or a manual to print at home
Choose Letter or A4 and a comfortable text size, and check the page count in the preview before printing: a larger size or wider margins adds pages.
Reading on a tablet in a PDF app
Keep the margins narrow so the text fills the screen, and choose a larger text size now rather than zooming in on every page later.
The book is a Kindle file in MOBI or AZW3
MOBI to PDF reads those formats the same way, as long as they are not protected.
Going the other way, from a PDF to an e-reader
PDF to EPUB reflows the text of a PDF into chapters an e-reader can resize.
Why a bought book is refused
Most books sold by the big stores are encrypted so that only the store's own app can open them. That encryption is DRM, and the tool checks for it before anything else: a protected book is refused by name rather than turned into pages of scrambled characters.
Removing DRM is not something PDFCheetah does. Books you wrote, books from publishers who sell without it, and public-domain books from libraries such as Project Gutenberg all convert.
Links, notes and what a page cannot hold
Links to websites and email addresses stay clickable in the PDF. Links that jump to another place in the same book, such as a footnote number or a line of the contents, keep their words but stop being links.
Sound, video and anything interactive are left out, because a page cannot play them. So are the print edition's page numbers that some books mark inside their text, since the PDF has pages of its own. Pictures in formats a PDF cannot hold directly, such as GIF, WebP or SVG, are redrawn as PNG first.
Very long books, and books full of pictures
One PDF takes at most 2,000 of a book's pictures, fewer when they are very large, and a picture inside a table cell or a heading cannot be placed at all. The preview counts the chapters and pictures it set, and how many pictures were left out, before you save anything.
Past the converter's size ceiling, a book is set up to that point and the preview says it stops early; a book that would run past 10,000 pages is refused instead. The PDF takes the book's own title where it has one, which a PDF reader shows in its title bar; the author is not written into the file.
What to know before you start
- Fonts, colors and page designs chosen by the book give way to a plain layout.
- Comics and other fixed-layout books come out as their text and pictures, not as their spreads.
- A script above the chosen Fonts level is drawn as a replacement mark.
- A book that would run past 10,000 pages is refused; one past the converter's size ceiling stops early, and the preview says so.