iPhone 101: iPhone+Stanza+Calibre (the almost-perfect solution)

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by Berylmary

Wha t is CSS?

"Cascading Style Sheets" are an external file that provides the format definition for the web page or (in this case) book. If your book has formatting and you turn off the CSS feature, you lose the formatting of the book (e.g. specific fonts, possibly bold and italics, indentations, etc.) At least, that has been my experience.

[mores]

Style definitions can be inside the html file as well.
Also, you should not lose important formatings (?) like bold, italic and paragraphs since they are usually not defined by styles, but by the approproate tags.

What you most probably lose are indents, huge-chapter-starting-first-letters and colors, fonts etc.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by mores

Style definitions can be inside the html file as well.
Also, you should not lose important formatings (?) like bold, italic and paragraphs since they are usually not defined by styles, but by the approproate tags.

What you most probably lose are indents, huge-chapter-starting-first-letters and colors, fonts etc.

Style definitions can be inside the html file, and I should not have lost important format settings, but nonetheless, that's what happened.

[RoninTech]

Originally Posted by clowe1028

Has anyone already used the restore tool? I always get a

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Cannot find backup folder; please specify it manually.

I already pointed it to the Backup folder with the wierdly named folder, still no luck.

Help?

No but I wrote this script that lets you pull your books directly off your iPhone/iPod Touch via SSH with their real names (needs jailbreaking for this). No iTunes needed.

NOTE: Might be a bit complicated for non-computer geeks...

[dpierron]

May I point this thread where I talk about calibre2opds, which generates ODPS catalogs (for use with Stanza, Aldiko) publishable automatically with the free Dropbox service, from Calibre database ?

[leebase]

Thanks to the OP for such a nice tutorial. Thanks to the Calibre author who is answering so many questions. But this thread has turned into a "general support forum for all things Calibre". It would be much nicer to have individual threads for the different topics than this one monster thread.

There is a Calibre section to this site.

Lee

[DVC]

Originally Posted by markz68

I have converted the same books via Stanza Desktop & Calibre. I find that Calibre does a much better job on the ones I was working with.

I figured that the speed issue was because Calibre was actually working harder to maintain the quality.

I write eBooks and as a test I loaded a short 18-page PDF that looks perfect into Calibre and converted to EPUB. Even before loading into iPhone, using the viewer I could see the conversion was terribly flawed. It did not remove Headers or Footers, for example.

So, I created a new PDF with everything "inline" and with colored text because a correctly assumed gray-behind text would get lost.. Again the conversion was terrible. Colored text was black. Captions under images were tossed into text and centered images moved right. Pix and their captions were divorced. Many paragraphs end with a single word on the next line. Some text was blown up to 30pts.

Moved to file Stanza on iPhone, the conversion was the same -- terrible.

Bottom-line -- Calibre is unuseable for the production of eBooks. I can only imagine what it would do with one of my 300-page books. Clearly, the original PDF reads better on the iPhone and will be far better on the iPad.

[dpierron]

Or, as some other people already have said : PDF is not an eBook format.
I don't know any way of automatically converting any PDF book (even the simple ones) into a correct ePub file.

[smit10]

Just to add....iPhone + Stanza + Calibre + MacJournal = almost perfect solution. I wanted to find a way to get my personal journal on to my iPhone 3G. This guide gave me the starting point. So I exported my MacJournal as PDF, loaded it into Calibre, converted to ePub, then uploaded to Stanza on my iphone. The layout isn't perfect as my MacJournal was populated by 3 years of RTF files from a Windows diary software, but at least it included photos I had added. Thanks for the great starter.

[clowe1028]

Anybody got an Error 404 while downloading their books in Dropbox? Some of the books that I uploaded to dropbox gives me an Error 404. Any help?

[dpierron]

If it's with every book, then Dropbox probably thinks you're using too much bandwidth : usually it's reset very quickly, and it may be because you're sharing your library with others.
If not, you may have another problem. Are you using Calibre2Opds ?

[DVC]

Originally Posted by dpierron

Or, as some other people already have said : PDF is not an eBook format.
I don't know any way of automatically converting any PDF book (even the simple ones) into a correct ePub file.

Of course, PDF is not an eBook format! That's why Calibre is CLAIMED to CONVERT PDF to EPUB! Did you even read my question?

PDF is CLAIMED to be supported as a Calibre INPUT format because it is THE universal standard for computer documents just as EPUB is almost THE universal standard for eBooks!

Not to be able to convert PDF to EPUB -- as you claim -- would mean that 90% of the world's documents could NOT be converted to EPUB by Calibre. Is this what you are saying?

Moreover, I tried inputting a .docx file and Calibre couldn't import it. Given that WORD is the second most -- after PDF -- common document format in the world, Calibre is even more useless.

Bottom-line, if you can't import PDFs and .docs -- then what formats are you converting?

PS: Right after your post there is this post:

"So I exported my MacJournal as PDF, loaded it into Calibre, converted to ePub, then uploaded to Stanza on my iphone."

So why are you saying PDF isn't an input format? The problem isn't PDF. The problem is that Calibre doesn't have the correct code to interpret PDFs AND/OR Calibre can't correctly generate EPUB. Don't blame the PDF when the I have several iPhone readers that accept my huge books and render them perfectly!

And, note I'm not the only one who reports the conversion isn't correct. From the same post, " The layout isn't perfect ..."

Either it's got to be perfect, or Calibre needs to enable you to make EPUB corrections in its Viewer.

[Tamara]

Originally Posted by DVC

Of course, PDF is not an eBook format! That's why Calibre is CLAIMED to CONVERT PDF to EPUB! Did you even read my question?

PDF is CLAIMED to be supported as a Calibre INPUT format because it is THE universal standard for computer documents just as EPUB is almost THE universal standard for eBooks!

Not to be able to convert PDF to EPUB -- as you claim -- would mean that 90% of the world's documents could NOT be converted to EPUB by Calibre. Is this what you are saying?

Moreover, I tried inputting a .docx file and Calibre couldn't import it. Given that WORD is the second most -- after PDF -- common document format in the world, Calibre is even more useless.

Bottom-line, if you can't import PDFs and .docs -- then what formats are you converting?

PS: Right after your post there is this post:

"So I exported my MacJournal as PDF, loaded it into Calibre, converted to ePub, then uploaded to Stanza on my iphone."

So why are you saying PDF isn't an input format? The problem isn't PDF. The problem is that Calibre doesn't have the correct code to interpret PDFs AND/OR Calibre can't correctly generate EPUB. Don't blame the PDF when the I have several iPhone readers that accept my huge books and render them perfectly!

And, note I'm not the only one who reports the conversion isn't correct. From the same post, " The layout isn't perfect ..."

Either it's got to be perfect, or Calibre needs to enable you to make EPUB corrections in its Viewer.

Amazing rant .

You use Sigil to edit epubs.

[Seabound]

@dvc You will not find many people in this forum who will agree that calibre is useless. On the contrary, I will argue that it is the software which singlehandedly saved us from the insanity of multiple eBook formats. Do not vent your frustrations with converting PDF and docx--which are not suitable eBook formats--by blaming calibre. It is free software which has been very useful to many of us in this forum, and Kovid is probably the most patient person in mobileread. You might do well to be more polite and re-consider you rant. Then maybe you will get better results.

[clowe1028]

I use Calibre to organize my ebooks and convert them to epubs, then I use Sigil to clean up the mess, then I use Calibre2Opds to generate the catalogs then I upload them to the Dropbox folder. I tried it again just now and it still can't get all the books.