EPUB to PDF Converter for E-books

Why people turn an EPUB into a PDF

EPUB is a reflowable format. The text has no fixed pages: your reader app pours it into whatever screen it has, so page 40 on a tablet may be page 112 on a phone. That is pleasant for reading in bed and annoying almost everywhere else. A teacher who wants to hand out chapter three, a student who has to cite a page number, someone who prefers to print a public-domain novel and read it with a pencil, a reviewer whose laptop has no e-book app: all of them need fixed pages, and PDF is the format every computer, printer and phone already opens.

The goal of this site is narrow. It takes the chapters stored inside the e-book and sets them again as proper pages, the way a small print shop would, instead of photographing a screen.

How the EPUB to PDF conversion works here

An EPUB is really a ZIP archive holding XHTML chapters, stylesheets, pictures and a package file that lists the reading order. When you add a book, the page opens that archive in memory, follows the reading order chapter by chapter, and turns the markup into headings, paragraphs, bold and italic words, lists, block quotes, code samples and pictures. Then it typesets everything onto PDF pages.

Before anything is saved you see an options window with a preview of the first pages. The choices that matter most:

• Page size: A4, US Letter, A5 (a handy book size) or 6 x 9 inches, the classic paperback and e-reader shape.
• Font: a serif face based on Times, or a sans-serif face. Size can be left on Auto (11.5 pt for A4 and Letter, 10.5 pt for the smaller formats) or set from 9 to 18 pt.
• Margins: narrow, normal or wide.
• Extras you can toggle: cover page, a contents page with clickable entries and page numbers, PDF bookmarks, page numbers, a fresh page for every chapter, and justified text.
• More options: line spacing (compact, normal, relaxed), paragraphs separated by space or indented book style, working links and footnotes, and compression for oversized pictures.

Your last settings are remembered in this browser, so a second book comes out looking like the first.

What survives the trip, and what does not

The default mode, called Readable PDF, produces genuine text. You can search it, highlight it and copy a quotation out of it, and the file stays small because words are stored as words, not as images. The book's own table of contents (from its navigation file, or the older NCX file) becomes the bookmark tree in your PDF viewer's side panel. Footnote markers and cross-references inside the book still jump to the right place, and web addresses stay clickable. Title, author, description and language are copied into the PDF properties.

The layout engine also tries to behave like a careful typesetter: a heading is kept together with the lines that follow it, and single stray lines at the top or bottom of a page are avoided. Simple styling from the book's CSS is respected, such as centred text, bold or italic classes, hidden elements, forced page breaks, relative font sizes and list numbering styles.

Some things change on purpose. Tables are written as rows of text with cells separated by a vertical bar, which reads fine for small tables but will not look like a grid. Embedded audio, video and scripts are dropped. Pictures that the book loads from the internet are skipped for privacy; only pictures stored inside the file are used. GIF, WebP, BMP and SVG artwork is converted so it can sit in the PDF. Fancy decorative fonts are replaced by the two built-in families.

The second mode: Exact look

The built-in typefaces cover Latin, Greek and Cyrillic letters. Books in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic or Hebrew need glyphs and right-to-left shaping they cannot provide. For those, choose Exact look. Here your browser itself draws each chapter, using the fonts installed on your device, and the result is saved as A4 page images. The other settings do not apply in this mode, the text cannot be selected or searched, and the file is larger, but the characters appear. The tool picks this mode in advance when the book declares a fixed layout or a right-to-left reading direction, and it suggests it after the preview when a noticeable share of the characters cannot be drawn. You can always switch back.

Problems you may run into

• "This e-book is protected with DRM." Books bought from many stores are encrypted. Their text cannot be read, so the converter stops and says so rather than giving you a blank PDF. Only DRM-free EPUBs work, for example titles from public-domain libraries, your own manuscripts, or shops that sell without copy protection.
• Missing characters. If the preview warns that some symbols cannot be drawn, those letters would be left out of the readable PDF. Exact look can usually show them.
• Not a valid EPUB. A half-downloaded file or a renamed archive cannot be opened. Download the book again. Files in other e-reader formats, such as MOBI, are not EPUBs and cannot be opened here.
• Phone runs out of memory. A heavily illustrated book can be demanding. Keep the picture compression on (it scales very large pictures down to 1800 pixels on the long side and saves them as JPEG), close other tabs, or use a computer.

Tips for a nicer printed book

1. For home printing pick A4 or Letter with wide margins so there is room to hole-punch or bind.
2. To read the PDF on a small e-reader or tablet, choose 6 x 9 or A5 with narrow margins; the text fills the screen better.
3. Indented paragraphs with justified text look like a printed novel; spaced paragraphs suit manuals and textbooks.
4. Turn off the cover page if you are printing in black and white and do not want a full-page photo eating toner.
5. Converting a series? Add all volumes at once. They share the settings and come out as separate PDFs, which you can save one by one or together as a ZIP.

Your book stays on your computer

All of the unzipping, parsing and page layout is done by JavaScript running in the tab you have open. The e-book is not sent anywhere, so there is no copy sitting on a remote machine and nothing to wait for while a server queue clears. When you close the tab, the book and the PDF disappear from memory. There is no account to create, no email to type and no watermark stamped on your pages.