---
title: Convert a PDF to EPUB on a Mac: text or exact pages
source: https://arazioformac.com/docs/pdf-to-epub
---

# Convert a PDF to EPUB

Pick the PDF up in Finder, hold <kbd>⇧</kbd>, 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](/docs/privacy).

## The other direction

An EPUB converts back to PDF, DOCX, HTML, RTF, Markdown and plain text — drag
it, hold <kbd>⇧</kbd>, 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.