EPUBLabWhy does my PDF look terrible on Kindle?
Updated:
Your PDF looks terrible on a Kindle because a PDF is a fixed page designed for paper, and the Kindle can only shrink or zoom that page, not re-flow the text. Converting it to a reflowable EPUB lets the reader lay out the text for the screen and the font size you choose.
Fixed layout vs. reflowable text
What a PDF stores
A PDF records where each character is drawn on a page of a given size. That is perfect for printing and useless for a 6-inch screen: the only options are tiny text or constant panning.
What an EPUB stores
An EPUB records the text and its structure: paragraphs, headings, chapters, notes and images. The reader decides where lines break, so the book fits any screen and any font size.
Why some conversions still look bad
Converting is only as good as the structure recovered from the PDF. Broken paragraphs, page numbers in the middle of sentences and columns read across are the usual failures; the benchmark shows how often each engine gets the reading order right.
Evidence from the benchmark
| Engine | 8-gram recall |
|---|---|
| EPUBLab engine (EPUB output) | 0.767 |
| EPUBLab engine (plain text) | 0.765 |
| pdf_oxide · extract_text | 0.726 |
| pdf_oxide · to_plain_text (XY-cut) | 0.658 |
| pdf_oxide · Markdown | 0.653 |
| PDFium · text().all() | 0.746 |
| OpenDataLoader PDF (local mode) | 0.749 |
| pdftotext (Poppler) | 0.743 |
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