Introduction

The goal of this project is to make the content of a PDF file accessible and easily viewable on the web. Converting PDF to HTML, it makes more responsive, user-friendly, and accessible. HTML-loving web users do not want to wait for downloading PDFs instead they can simply read the content directly in the browser window. By creating HTML files, we can easily share those files on social media than the PDF format. Linking to the specific data or content is simple in HTML.

The HTML files are better enhanced for web search engines. We can also edit the content in a smoother and quicker way in the HTML files. Updating the HTML documents is easy and it makes the content relevant and up-to-date. With PDFs, making changes can be difficult and require the source files and specialized software. HTML provides several benefits over PDFs for digital content, including accessibility, ease of production, ease of making changes, responsiveness, and search engine optimization.

Challenges

Converting the pdf to HTML consists of several procedures. The book will be provided either in an editable or non-editable format. The pdf documents had multi-column text, tables, images, and footnotes. We need to restore the exact layout as per PDF during the conversion. Extracting the text from the given PDF files including special characters is vital for maintaining the accuracy of the content.

PDFs also contain hyperlinks and references which need to be converted to HTML links. Image conversion from PDF to HTML is quite important including proper semantic structure, alt text for images, and support for assistive technologies.

Solution

As the provided book had multi-column text, we need to retain the exact layout as per the pdf. Our team members used some specific ideas to write the CSS to get the layout matched with the pdf. For linking hyperlinks and references, we used replacements to get all links linked as if we manually go for linking, it would take a large amount of time. It was so efficient in linking websites and references present in the PDF by following such shortcuts.

We are able to complete the complex book on time and with a good accuracy level. It improved the accessibility of the HTML content by adding alt text for images.

Conclusion

Converting PDF to HTML provides a feasible solution for making accessible PDF documents user-friendly on the web. By addressing the challenges and considerations discussed in this case study, the client appreciated our efforts in converting PDF content into HTML.