Thread: Glo Calibre cover problem
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Old 02-20-2013, 12:53 AM   #6
davidfor
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tkavan View Post
The item I was talking about was a book review, not a book. I had it as a text file, and converted it to epub using an online converter. When I opened it in Calibre, all the quotation marks and apostrophes were replaced by little boxes... hollow squares.

I couldn't find any way to fix that in Calibre, so I used Calibre to generate the epub file, and all was OK. Which I guess makes sense.
They could be unicode characters. Try doing the the conversion in yourself in calibre. On the "Look & Feel" page of the conversion settings, there is an option to "Transliterate unicode characters to ASCII". That might solve it.

Trying the conversion yourself is a good idea even if you don't change any settings. A lot of on-line conversions sites use calibre for the conversion, but are using an old version. The current version usually does a better job.
Quote:
But is there a way to edit files in Calibre? To use a search-and-replace for example to fix problems or do text formatting? Or do you have to do all that before converting it to an epub? And if the answer to the last question is "Yes," what's the best format to work in to prepare a file for Calibre to convert to epub?
If you have an epub in calibre, you can use the "Tweak book" option to expand the epub and then edit the files. The files you need to edit are HTML, so you can use a text editor. I do this for small changes. For larger changes, I use Sigil. This is a dedicate ePub editor.

Best format for input to the conversion is probably HTML. epubs are really a zip container with HTML files in them. That means if you have a nicely formatted HTML file, the epub should be OK. But, calibre does a reasonable conversion of most formats, so it really depends on where you are getting the text from and what you are comfortable with. If you are writing a novel in Word, then you can save it as HTML, and convert that (there are ways to improve this). If you have plain text, start with that and then edit in Sigil to change formatting. If you have mobi files, the conversion is very good.
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