Convert EPUB to PDF
Set the page size and margins before you convert, and get a PDF with real, selectable text — not photographs of rendered pages. Nothing is uploaded.
How to convert EPUB to PDF
- 01 Choose your EPUBDrop the file above or tap to pick one from your device.
- 02 Set page size and marginsA4 or Letter for printing, 6×9″ for a book-like page. Defaults work fine.
- 03 Convert and downloadPress Convert to PDF, then Download PDF. Nothing leaves your device.
EPUB vs PDF — what changes
Text reflows to fit any screen. Readers control text size, font and theme. Page numbers don’t exist — position is a percentage.
Every page is frozen at the size you choose here. Perfect for printing and annotation; text no longer adapts to the screen.
Choosing a page size
The single decision that changes the output most. An EPUB has no pages — it reflows to whatever screen it lands on. Converting to PDF means fixing a page size, and the one you pick determines line length, page count, and whether the result is printable.
A4 — 210 × 297 mm
The default nearly everywhere outside North America, and the right choice if the PDF is going to be read on a laptop or printed on an office printer. It is a tall, wide page: at a normal reading size, body text runs to roughly 90 characters per line, which is longer than a book and noticeably harder on the eye over a whole chapter. Use it for reports, course readings, and anything that will be printed on ordinary paper. Not a good choice for a novel.
US Letter — 8.5 × 11 in
The North American office standard. Slightly wider and shorter than A4, and functionally the same decision — pick it over A4 if the file is going to a printer in the US or Canada, so nobody has to rescale it. The same line-length caveat applies.
6 × 9 in — trade paperback
The standard trim for a self-published paperback, and the size KDP and IngramSpark both use as their default. This is the one to pick if you want the output to read like a book. The narrower page brings line length down to roughly 65 characters, which is inside the range typographers consider comfortable, and the proportions match what your eye expects from a printed novel.
Most browser converters produce a generic A4 and give you no say in it. If you are reading a converted book rather than printing an office document, 6 × 9 is almost always the better output.
Margins are set alongside the page size: Narrow (0.5 in), Medium (0.75 in) or Wide (1.25 in). Medium is the default and suits most books; go Wide if you are printing and want room for a thumb, Narrow to save pages.
What carries over, and what changes
An EPUB and a PDF disagree about what a page is. Everything below follows from that one difference.
Carries over
Headings keep their hierarchy and their relative size. Paragraphs survive intact. Images — interior pictures and the cover — are placed in the flow at the point they appear in the book. Lists keep their markers and nesting, bold and italic carry across, and chapters appear in spine order: the same order your reader shows them in.
Changes
Line breaks reset. The EPUB never had fixed lines. Every line break in the PDF is calculated fresh at the page width you chose here, so no line will fall where it fell on your e-reader.
Your reader's font settings no longer apply. Your e-reader's typeface, size and theme were its own preferences applied at display time. A PDF has no display-time preferences — the type is set once, when the file is made.
Position becomes a page number. An EPUB tracks where you are as a percentage, because there are no pages to number. A PDF has real, fixed page numbers instead.
Embedded fonts are not carried through. The PDF is typeset in the converter’s own text font rather than any font embedded in the EPUB.
If you want control over the typography before this point, run the book through Style Studio first and set the typeface, spacing and margins there.
Real text, not pictures of pages
This is the difference that does not show up in a feature comparison, and it is the one that matters most six months later.
There are two ways to make a PDF from an ebook. The easy way is to render each page in a browser engine and photograph it — the output looks right, and every page is an image. The other way is to typeset the text into the PDF directly, as text. Epub Studio does the second: the output is built with jsPDF, which writes real glyphs and real text runs into the file.
- You can search it
- Ctrl-F finds words. In a rasterised PDF it finds nothing, because there are no words in the file — only pixels arranged to look like words.
- You can select and copy from it
- Quoting a passage means highlighting it, not retyping it.
- Screen readers can read it
- A page-image PDF is opaque to assistive technology unless somebody runs OCR over it afterwards. This one is not.
- The file is far smaller
- Text is a few kilobytes a chapter. Page images are a few hundred kilobytes a page, every page, whether the page had a picture on it or not.
You can check this in ten seconds: open the converted PDF and press Ctrl-F for a word you know is in chapter one.
Printing your book
Useful for a proof copy. Not a substitute for a print interior file.
If you are printing at home, or running off a proof to read on paper, convert at 6 × 9 with Wide margins and print two-up on A4 or Letter. That works well and is what most people want from this page.
If you are submitting to KDP Print or IngramSpark, read this part. A commercial print interior needs things this converter does not produce:
- Bleed
- Anything that runs to the edge of the page — a full-bleed image, a coloured chapter opener — needs to extend past the trim line so the guillotine has tolerance. This tool lays out to the trim size with no bleed area.
- A mirrored gutter
- Printed books need more margin on the bound edge than the outer edge, and the two swap on facing pages. This tool applies the same margin to all four sides of every page rather than mirroring them, so text on a bound proof will sit closer to the spine than it should.
- Embedded and licensed fonts
- Print vendors require every font embedded with print licensing attached.
- Front matter and pagination conventions
- Half-title, title, copyright page, roman-numeraled front matter — a book interior has structure a conversion cannot invent.
So: use this for a readable, printable proof at the right trim. For a paid print run, take the manuscript into a layout tool, or use KDP's own interior templates. We would rather say that than have you upload a rejected interior.
If the output looks wrong
- The fonts are not the ones in my book
- Expected. The PDF is typeset in the converter’s text font. Set the typography you want in Style Studio first if it matters to you.
- Images are enormous, or overflow the page
- An image sized for a wide screen does not fit a 6 × 9 page. The usual cause is print-resolution artwork inside the EPUB. Run the file through the EPUB Compressor first — it recompresses interior images without touching the text.
- Chapters break in odd places, or one starts mid-page
- The EPUB's own chapter boundaries are spine items; if the book was converted from Word by another tool, those boundaries may not be where you think they are. Check the file with the EPUB Validator to see the actual spine.
- The whole thing is one long chapter
- The source EPUB has no chapter structure — usually a sign it came from a PDF originally.
- The conversion stalls, or the tab runs out of memory
- The whole file is held in RAM while it converts. A very large illustrated book can exhaust an older phone. Compress it first, or convert on a desktop.
The long version is in Convert EPUB to PDF without losing formatting.
Questions
Which page size should I pick for printing? ＋
For a book you want to read like a book, 6×9 inches — it is the standard trade paperback trim, it is what KDP and IngramSpark default to, and it gives you a line length of roughly 65 characters, which is comfortable. For a document going to an office printer, pick A4 outside North America and US Letter inside it, so nobody has to rescale the file. If you are unsure and the PDF is just for reading on a screen, 6×9 still wins — an A4 page of body text has lines long enough to be tiring.
Why are my line breaks different from my e-reader? ＋
Because they were never fixed in the first place. An EPUB has no pages and no lines — the text reflows to whatever screen opens it, and your e-reader calculated its own line breaks using its own font, size and margins. A PDF freezes one arrangement. Every line break in the output is computed fresh at the page size and margins you chose here. Nothing has been lost; the layout has simply been recalculated for a different page.
Are the fonts from my EPUB preserved? ＋
No. Fonts embedded in the EPUB are not carried into the PDF; the output is typeset in the converter’s own text font at the page size you chose. This is also true of most e-readers, which override a book’s fonts with their own settings — so the PDF is usually closer to what you were already seeing than to what the publisher specified. If the typeface matters, set it in Style Studio before converting.
Can I convert a PDF back to EPUB? ＋
Yes — the PDF to EPUB tool does the reverse, and makes a fixed PDF reflow to any screen. It is worth knowing that the round trip is lossy in both directions. A PDF stores positioned words rather than paragraphs, so the conversion back has to infer where paragraphs and headings were. If you still have the original EPUB, keep it — it is the better master copy.
Is there a file size limit? ＋
There is no size cap — nothing is uploaded, so no server quota applies. The real ceiling is your device’s memory, because the whole file is held in RAM while it converts: a novel is trivial anywhere, a very large illustrated book can be slow or run out of memory on an older phone. If one struggles, run it through the EPUB Compressor first — it usually shrinks image-heavy books by half.
Does this work with DRM-protected books? ＋
No. Files with DRM can’t be opened by any converter. This tool works with DRM-free files — like the ones you export from your own writing tools or buy from DRM-free stores.