I am by no means an expert. But here are some tips-
Before converting check the metadata and add the cover if needed.
when converting PDF to another format, I usually click on the Heuristic Processing option, click enable, UNclick italicize common words (and sometimes I unclick delete spaces between paragraphs). Then I go down to Search & Replace, click on the magic wand square on the right, and you can get a look at the coding. I usually ignore all the stuff at the beginning. Go down into the body of the document and look for headers and other symbols. For example some documents have an odd character like a black mark ‟ instead of an apostrophe or quotation marks. So copy it and paste it into the search box and click ok. Then in the Replace box, put the correct character ' or ". If there are more things to remove or replace, click on the next wand and select another section of text such as [Marie Harte ] - not the brackets, I put them in to illustrate that it is important to include the space if it is there. The actual coding looks like this < i >< b >Marie Harte < /b >< /i > (spaces added by me) but its not necessary to put in the tags etc as it will be ignored. Paste the header into the search box. Leave the replace box blank.
When you find the amberlit garbage, also pay attention to the tags... the data to put in the box usually looks like this [Generated by ABC Amber LIT Conv ] and [erter,
http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html] (brackets added by me)--the stuff in the tags will disappear once you take the text out.
If there is a header that looks like this 2 author's name you can fix that too....make sure to add the exact number of spaces. To get the number out of all the headers (instead of just page 2) change the 2 to \d+ and make sure you don't change the number of spaces. This will also work for headers that say something like Page 13 change it to Page \d+
If you don't like how your PDF turns out you can try converting from PDF to ZIP (which is html) and the ZIP to mobi, or try PDF to TXT then TXT to MOBI, or epub if that's what you want.
Oh another thing....the search and replace only has 3 boxes for text... when there are more than 3 things that need correction what I do is for the 4th item, click convert mobi to mobi (if that's what I converted to) then search and replace, then fill in whatever text you need.....you won't loose the 1st three that you already did.
I hope that is clear and gets you going in the right direction!
