Everyday

PDF to EPUB

Pick the PDF up in Finder, hold ⇧, and let go toward EPUB. Arazio then asks one question, because a PDF makes two very different books.

The question, and how to answer it

Flowing text rebuilds the words as text. The reader re-wraps them to whatever screen it is on, and they can be searched, selected, resized and read aloud. That is what an ebook is for, and it is the right answer for a report, a manual or a novel.

The cost: the layout is rebuilt from the words alone, so columns, tables and exact spacing can move.

Exact pages photographs every page instead. Nothing moves — it looks exactly like the PDF, columns, spacing and all.

The cost: nothing on the page is text any more. No searching, no selecting, no resizing, no reading aloud, and the file is several times larger.

Which one you want

Ask what the layout is doing.

If the layout is just how the words happened to fall — a report, a paper, a book — choose flowing text. On a phone it is the difference between reading and pinch-zooming.

If the layout is the content — a magazine, a brochure, a form, sheet music, anything in columns, anything designed — choose exact pages. A PDF records where every glyph sits and nothing about why, so rebuilding that as flowing text means guessing at a structure nobody ever wrote down. The guesses show.

If it is a scan, there is nothing to decide: a scanned page is a picture, so exact pages is the only thing that can work. Arazio checks, says so, and picks it for you.

This is not OCR

Arazio reads the text a PDF already contains. It never recognises characters from pixels.

That distinction matters when you are holding a scan. A scanned PDF has no text layer, so no tool that reads one can give you searchable text — you would need optical character recognition, which is a different job. Flowing text on a scan would produce an empty book, which is exactly why Arazio does not offer it there.

What comes across

Figures. Pictures in the PDF arrive in the book, between the paragraphs they sat between, sized to the share of the page they filled rather than to their pixel count.

Headings, roughly. A PDF has no headings, only text that happens to be bigger. Arazio treats the largest size as chapter breaks so the table of contents has something to point at, which is more than a single entry and less than a real structure.

Not the exact page breaks, in flowing text. A reflowable book has no pages of its own; the reader makes them to fit the screen. That is the point of the format.

Nothing is uploaded

The conversion runs on your Mac. The engines contain no networking code at all. Privacy and permissions.

The other direction

An EPUB converts back to PDF, DOCX, HTML, RTF, Markdown and plain text — drag it, hold ⇧, and pick. The reading order comes from the book's own spine rather than from the order its files happen to be stored in, so chapters arrive in the order they are meant to be read.