Reference Eliot, Charles W. (editor): Harvard Classics 01-51 V2. June 14 2011

[crich70]

I converted the LRF versions of the Harvard Classics using Calibre and
made the books easier to search through by using regular numbers and
titles rather than the roman numerals. These copies have the same working TOC that the LRF version has. I haven't changed any of the actual contents of the files. It's just a straight convert to Mobipocket format. I decided to post them as zips because it would take forever to track down each separate file and upload a copy of the converted file. Enjoy.

Edit: I found the missing book # 26. It had been converted but I missed it when I was editing the metadata and I didn't realize among all the others that I had missed it. Sorry about that.

[Dr. Drib]

These were RWood's original compilations, which he lovingly assembled for MoibleRead.

Thank you, crich70, for making the conversions into Mobi.




Don

[crich70]

You're welcome Dr.Drib and it was my pleasure to post the LRF conversions with working TOC's. I can only imagine that if he'd had the time given him RWood would have either posted them himself or somehow reworked the files to fix the missing TOC's. I think a functional TOC always makes it more convenient to move round in an ebook, even when it's fairly short. And with a collection like the Harvard Classics it is even more so.

[nrapallo]

H.C.26 is missing from the zipped files.

Also, to facilitate better sorting I edited the filenames to remove any leading spaces and insert a leading zero so that all titles had two digit numbers. Also, some (most) title also had a leading space which was removed.

This is how it looks (sorted): HC_listing.jpg

Doesn't detract from your effort, just a bit of housekeeping...

[DaleDe]

All we need now is a good set of ePub files. Of course there is always the The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction.

[Ransom]

Can someone tell me why Calibre puts it's TOC at the end of a book instead of the beginning? Seriously, I know there must be some reason for this.

[crich70]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

H.C.26 is missing from the zipped files.

I wonder how that happened. I was sure I zipped them all together properly. I must have a gremlin running round somewhere. I found the missing one. I thought I'd renamed them all but it turned out I had missed one of the books. My bad.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

All we need now is a good set of ePub files.

Working on it as we speak (type)...

Thanks to crich70, I've got a good head start!

EDIT: removed any work-in-progress .epubs

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by Ransom

Can someone tell me why Calibre puts it's TOC at the end of a book instead of the beginning? Seriously, I know there must be some reason for this.

calibre appends the TOC it creates at the end of the ebook when converting to .mobi. That TOC is unreachable from within the text of the ebook and requires the Mobipocket "Table of Contents" special link to access it.

The original source .lrf ebook didn't have internal TOC (but an external one) which was appended to the end by calibre, when these .mobi ebooks were converted by crich70.

It's just the way it was designed to work (automated).

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

Working on it as we speak (type)...

Thanks to crich70, I've got a good head start!

LIMITED TIME ONLY: Here's a few (.epub) samplers. Do they look/work OK?

I think they need some work before thinking about publishing them here. The TOC is a bit wierd with inconsistent places to jump. Poetry is poorly formatted. There are missing characters showing up in ADE. However they are good starting points for Sigil I think. Unfortunately it looks like they might need some proofreading but maybe a quick scan will search up some search and replace tricks.

Were they converted from Mobi or LRF?

Dale

[Ransom]

Thanks for the explanation Nick. I've been making my own links in html by simply bookmarking the individual chapter headings and then linking them to the chapter titles on the contents page. This works fine in my Kindle, but I've notice that if I access the "go to" feature in Kindle3, the TOC portion of the sub-menu is grayed out, so I must still be doing something wrong.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

I think they need some work before thinking about publishing them here.

Before posting them, I'll tweak them as best I can using ePubFixer and tweak_epub, but these conversions en masse using calibre can break some formatting, like centering in ADE rendered epubs and extra white space between paragraphs. To fix this usually needs a "tweak" to the css generated by calibre. Hopefully, all that is needed is "tweaks" to make it look like the original formatting.

I may even relocate the last page inline TOC to the beginning of the ebook just after the cover page.

The TOC is a bit wierd with inconsistent places to jump.

calibre is adding those links but is also breaking up the chapters to best comply with the ADE 300k file size limit, so I think that's what you're noticing. Hopefully, a "tweak" will suffice.

Poetry is poorly formatted. There are missing characters showing up in ADE. However they are good starting points for Sigil I think.

Converting the work of others using calibre is sometimes daunting due to those aforementioned little issues that creep up in the finished product. For quick fixes, instead of using Sigil, I prefer to use external tools like ePubFixer and tweak_epub and/or winrar with a good text editor.

Sigil introduces it's own quirks which may be fine when using it to also clean up the heading structure, add footnote back links, correct/replace spurious characters, etc. It may be more useful on any "Round Two" improvements...

Unfortunately it looks like they might need some proofreading but maybe a quick scan will search up some search and replace tricks.

Hopefully, the conversion using calibre will not be the source of these, but you know what they say about GIGO (Garbage in Garbage Out).

Were they converted from Mobi or LRF?

These epub conversions were made from the .mobi ebooks posted above by crich70 using batch files and the ebook-convert command line program from calibre. Using ebook-convert, I can automatically remove the duplicate cover image, don't make calibre add it's own cover page, allow calibre to add it's chapter detected links to the external epub TOC, override the METADATA to match the edited filenames, ...

[crich70]

Originally Posted by nrapallo

Before posting them, I'll tweak them as best I can using ePubFixer and tweak_epub, but these conversions en masse using calibre can break some formatting, like centering in ADE rendered epubs and extra white space between paragraphs. To fix this usually needs a "tweak" to the css generated by calibre. Hopefully, all that is needed is "tweaks" to make it look like the original formatting.

I may even relocate the last page inline TOC to the beginning of the ebook just after the cover page.



calibre is adding those links but is also breaking up the chapters to best comply with the ADE 300k file size limit, so I think that's what you're noticing. Hopefully, a "tweak" will suffice.



Converting the work of others using calibre is sometimes daunting due to those aforementioned little issues that creep up in the finished product. For quick fixes, instead of using Sigil, I prefer to use external tools like ePubFixer and tweak_epub and/or winrar with a good text editor.

Sigil introduces it's own quirks which may be fine when using it to also clean up the heading structure, add footnote back links, correct/replace spurious characters, etc. It may be more useful on any "Round Two" improvements...



Hopefully, the conversion using calibre will not be the source of these, but you know what they say about GIGO (Garbage in Garbage Out).



These epub conversions were made from the .mobi ebooks posted above by crich70 using batch files and the ebook-convert command line program from calibre. Using ebook-convert, I can automatically remove the duplicate cover image, don't make calibre add it's own cover page, allow calibre to add it's chapter detected links to the external epub TOC, override the METADATA to match the edited filenames, ...

Problems with the epub conversions might be due to the fact that the mobi's I posted were converted from the LRF copies of the books. That is the problems might be the result of running the books through conversion twice. Have you tried downloading the LRF's and converting them to epubs nrapallo? Or did you start with the LRF files to begin with?

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by crich70

Problems with the epub conversions might be due to the fact that the mobi's I posted were converted from the LRF copies of the books. That is the problems might be the result of running the books through conversion twice.

That may be part of it, but I'm used to cleaning up .html inconsistencies, and as long as they are not overwhelming, I can usually get satisfactory results.

Have you tried downloading the LRF's and converting them to epubs nrapallo? Or did you start with the LRF files to begin with?

I originally downloaded all the .lrf ebooks and was going to use LRFTools to convert them to .epub, however, the first few conversions I did showed me that a lot of work was needed to get them working properly.

You've helped that cause by posting these .mobi ebook conversions, so I saw an opportunity to use those .mobi ebooks as the source for my .epub conversions. I'm already done converting them all to .epub and have started to tweak some to get a sense of the task at hand. After finishing one (I selected H.C.26, the late comer), I think I'll be able to fix the rest hopefully the same way.

The resulting .epub converted from mobi is attached and was created by using following ebook-convert command:

ebook-convert "H.C.26_Continental Drama - Harvard Classics.mobi" .epub --title "H.C.26_Continental Drama" --authors "Eliot, Charles W. (editor)" --publisher="Harvard Classics" --chapter "//h2" --no-default-epub-cover --remove-first-image --output-profile=sony

Here's the output of that conversion:

1% Converting input to HTML...
InputFormatPlugin: MOBI Input running
on D:\ebooks-HC\H.C.26_Continental Drama - Harvard Classics.mobi
Parsing all content...
Forcing Harvard_Classics_Volume_XXVI.html into XHTML namespace
34% Running transforms on ebook...
Merging user specified metadata...
Detecting structure...
Removed first image
Flattening CSS and remapping font sizes...
Source base font size is 12.00000pt
Removing fake margins...
Cleaning up manifest...
Trimming unused files from manifest...
Trimming 'images/00006.jpg' from manifest
Trimming 'images/00002.jpg' from manifest
Creating EPUB Output...
67% Creating EPUB Output
Rescaling image from 584x754 to 566x731 images/calibre_cover.jpg
	Looking for large trees in Harvard_Classics_Volume_XXVI.html...
	Found large tree #106
	Split into 110 parts
The cover image has an id != "cover". Renaming to work around bug in Nook Color
EPUB output written to D:\ebooks-HC\H.C.26_Continental Drama - Harvard Classics.epub
Output saved to   D:\ebooks-HC\H.C.26_Continental Drama - Harvard Classics.epub

After using ePubFixer coupled with tweak_epub (set as Sigil editor ), I was able to produce a "fixed" version. I'll attach these samples to this post for a limited time and then delete them.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

There are missing characters showing up in ADE.

Originally Posted by crich70

Problems with the epub conversions might be due to the fact that the mobi's I posted were converted from the LRF copies of the books.

I note that those missing/weird characters Dale noticed were also IN the .lrf ebook!!!

In H.C 26, the Title Page for the first book therein has "Calderyn" and the text of that book has "Calderon" but the original .mobi ebook used "Calderón".

Also, the original .mobi ebook, for the last book therein (the Wilhelm Tell story), has listed under the DRAMATIS PERSONAE the names "WALTER FÜRST, WILLIAM TELL, RÖSSELMANN". The .lrf ebook has "WALTER FЬRST, WILLIAM TELL, RЦSSELMANN," and my converted .epub has "WALTER F?RST, WILLIAM TELL, R?SSELMANN"

The original .mobi ebooks have the correct (foreign) characters, so it may be best to use the TOC from the converted .mobi ebooks and the text from the original .mobi ebooks.

For now I'll put the .epub versions on hold, pending investigating how best to continue from here...