What is the optimal way to convert an RPG book to a text format?

lou
2025-03-31T05:03:30Z

An RPG book is a book containing the rules and setting for a tabletop RPG game. Like Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition, Worlds Without Number, Star Trek Adventures, etc.

The fact that they are rarely in text format always puts me off reading RPG books. I don't want to diminish the importance of art, but importing printed RPG books is prohibitively expensive, and reading huge PDFs on a laptop is not a good experience for me.

I also find it unpleasant to navigate the complicated design of these books. They're distracting.

I have a 6.8" Kindle Paperwhite but reading RPG PDFs on it is awful. RPG books have lots of art and complicated layouts. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way to make an RPG into text. I was seriously considering just copying the text and converting it to markdown myself (it doesn't need to be markdown, just something that I can convert into a format my Kindle understands) when I remembered chatGPT.

Copying the text and asking GPT to make it into markdown worked okay, but it missed the tables. Sending an image of a page worked pretty well, so I think AI is the way here. But I am not a GPT subscriber and I bet I'll hit a limit at some point. Also, instead of sending pages individually, I would prefer to send the PDF and get the result in text. Even if there were limitations (like only 10 pages in one go), it would be an improvement.

In any case, using chatGPT will be much better than doing it by hand. But is there an AI or other kind of PDF service that is better suited for that task, so I can reduce the amount of manual input?

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