[jdmichal]

Absolutely right. PDF fixes the problem Word documents have where different versions of Word tends to render the document ever so differently. Usually in a way that seems to mess up all those beautiful page breaks you meticulously planned. It does this by every element having absolute positioning.

[Maarten88]

Most people don't know you can open a PDF in Word 2016 and edit it, just like a .doc/.docx file...

Of course, reflowing the document is really painful with that source.

[MichaelGG]

And is the scourge of every paper I want to read on my Kindle. Everyone publishes their PDFs and there seems to be no reliable way to reflow them.

[r00fus]

Which is why ePub and other digital book formats exist. I'm glad there is a format that prioritizes WYSIWYG over reflow (though the part of the spec where the introduced scripting is a bit dodgy)

[CoryG89]

The "Reading Mode" on the Adobe's Acrobat app for Android does a pretty good job of reflowing most of the PDFs I've thrown at it.

[jdmichal]

Should be able to easily reflow text as long as it's using newline operators (T*, ', "). Might still need some basic heuristics for paragraph breaks. But much better than the alternative of attempting to correlate individual lines of text together based on positioning.

[H4CK3RM4N]

I use calibri for my E-Books, and it seems to do a pretty good job of reflowing PDFs(and exporting to mobi). YMMV though, especially if headers/footers are badly done.

[PhasmaFelis]

Off-topic, but you seem like you might know: why does text copied from PDFs sometimes have messed-up spaces? It seems to guess where the spaces should go based on kerning, so with justified text, a widely-spaced line may come out with a space between each letter, while a narrowly-spaced one has no spaces at all.

(Also the thing where it inserts line breaks at the end of every print line is maddening)

[mnw21cam]

That's often caused by the font specified in the PDF not being available on the platform where the PDF viewer is running, so a different font has been used instead.

[PhasmaFelis]

Hmm. I may have been unclear--the PDF reads fine, but if I copy and paste some text into a text editor, I get the messed-up spaces. It seems as if the PDF doesn't encode text as text but just as a series of characters and locations, leaving spaces unrecorded, so when copy-pasting the reader has to guess from the distance between letters.