Mobipocket output

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by llasram

Did you see post #41 in this thread?

I completely missed your earlier post. sorry about that.

And thanks for being so patient.

[Amalthia]

Okay I tested this code.

p {
text-indent: 1em;
margin: 0;
}

and I tried

p {
text-indent: 1em;
}

and neither did anything to address the wide indent for every paragraph.

[kovidgoyal]

Disable the remove paragraph spacing option

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Disable the remove paragraph spacing option

but if I do that won't there be a space between the paragraphs?

[kovidgoyal]

yeah but you can add the following to override css to get rid of the spaces
(this is what that option does anyway)

p { margin: 0pt; border:0pt;}

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

yeah but you can add the following to override css to get rid of the spaces
(this is what that option does anyway)

p { margin: 0pt; border:0pt;}

I'll try this later tonight. And thanks for helping.

[Amalthia]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

yeah but you can add the following to override css to get rid of the spaces
(this is what that option does anyway)

p { margin: 0pt; border:0pt;}

It appears I didn't need to use your code after all. Once I un-selected the remove paragraph space it all worked.

Again, thank you for your help. I still don't get why it worked like that...but I'm glad it's working regardless.

Edit: Um it looks like I spoke too soon. I tried the same thing on another file and I'm back to having spaces between paragraphs.

[brewt]

Originally Posted by brewt

Brewt's Contribution to the Plan for World Domination

blah blah blah
ticket 1687 opened.

-bjc

on Latest build 0.4.132:

test files - same as before - my toc with 2 html files.

the links from my toc now work (yay!).

However, with "Do Not Add Generated Table of Contents" checked, this Table of Contents is added anyway:

Table of Contents
1st book
2nd book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Sub Chapter
Chapter 3
Epilogue
[MSOffice1]
[MSOffice1]


With "Do Not Add Generated Table of Contents" UNchecked, this toc is added:

Table of Contents
1st book
2nd book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Sub Chapter
Chapter 3
Part 1
Part 2


My toc:

Test
1st book 3765 bytes
2nd book 4096 bytes

The sub toc from the 1st book:

1st book (<title>)
Blah blah blah blurb

Chapter 1 (<h1>)
Chapter 2 (<h1>)

Sub Chapter (<h2>)

Chapter 3 (<h1>)

Epilogue (<h1>)

The
sub toc from the second book:

2nd book (<title>)
Blah blah blah blurb
Prologue (<h1>)

Part 1 (<h2>)

Chapter 1 (<h3>)
Chapter 2 (<h3>)

Part 2 (<h2>)

Chapter 3 (<h3>)

Epilogue (<h1>)

On generating tocs: if "Don't Add" is checked, should the Table of contents be the root html file imported?
And if it isn't, the 1st html seems to have 2 layers, but the 2nd html file seems to only have the 2nd layer (not the 1st or 3rd).

Thoughts?

Case 1687 reopened.

-bjc

Oh, uh, all thru the gui.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by brewt

However, with "Do Not Add Generated Table of Contents" checked, this Table of Contents is added anyway:

"Do Not Add Generated TOC" should probably cause the output Mobipocket book not to have a generated TOC, but beyond that (comparing the generated TOCs) what do you expect to happen? For any document with more than a very simple, obvious, and flat layout there just isn't a good way to reliably completely automate generation of a TOC. If you want an accurate / multi-level TOC you need to provide it with either the calibre XPath TOC detection options or a manually written NCX file.

[brewt]

For my purposes (because, as we all know, it IS all about me), The way to add a multi-file book is to drag the root document (toc) into the gui - would there be a way to label that document as a toc and have it be w....well know wait a minute, I haven't tried something yet.

Suppose I have a directory full of html files (chapters, books, whatever), but haven't built a toc, and want calibre to create a book and the toc. Whic file do I point the gui to? Does calibre create the zip based on the contents of the entire directory, or is there something that it is parsing to say "this file, not that one"?

If I have built a TOC, and drag it it, and do not check "Do Not Add Generated TOC", then Calibre shouldn't build one anyway. It would make sense to me to have some way to mark the file as the toc - that's how it works in Mobi Creator.

Am I thinkin' wrong (again)?

-bjc

[brewt]

uh oh. Thought some more.

In order to muddy the waters even further:

1) If one were to build a single ebook out of a single-file source, and doing it all the really hard way (hand-coding xhtml in notepad), the notion of having the ebook generation software create the table of contents for you is a handy thing - notepad don't do that.

If suggestions are ok, may I suggest that your built-in parsing routines simply indent the differing layers of headline calls:

<h1>

<H2>

<h3>

<h1>

<h2>

This "should" make your built-in routines for creating a toc build something more reader-friendly, than
<h1>
<h1>
<h2>
<h1>
<h2>
and "shouldn't" be too far out of whack from the outline of the book.

Because I haven't done it this way, if I have multiple documents I intend to be combined into the book - what order do they appear in? The sort order they are in my source directory? Then each subdocument would have the same routine leveled against it, and again, the outline of the book "should" be presented in the toc.

I'm assuming you've seen this part of MobiCreator, where i can specify certain page-types (attached photo). This grants me a layer of control in mobi that I would want in Calibre - so I can use one app to create both outputs pretty much the same way.

Personally, outside of the toc (in mobi) I haven't had much need for those other book-document-types, but "real" pro might....


-bjc

[kovidgoyal]

calibre follows all links in HTML files to create the ZIP from an HTML file. It does this recursively upto 5 (IIRC) levels of recursion.

The order that is used to combine the files into a single source is the "depth first" order of appearance of links. You can always customize this by creating an OPF file that specifies the desired order.

As for the TOC, you can use the --level*-toc options to create a TOC from multiple files. If you dont want to specify these options, the TOC can also be created from links in the files. In either case the algorithm for finding TOC elements is applied to each HTML file successively.

And for complete control you can create an NCX file that specifies the TOC and have calibre use that.

And on a general note, I should point out that calibre is designed for file *conversion*, not *creation*. The idea is that you use your favorite software to create the ebook and then calibre to convert it to various formats.

[Abelturd]

Sorry if this has been discussed before and I overlooked it but I tried to grab a webpage article with Bookit Ff extension and Bookit saved it only in lrf format. Then I tried to convert it to mobi prc but failed with Calibre giving me this error message: Cannot convert...as this book has no supported formats.
So my question is: doesn't Calibre support conversion from lrf to mobi yet or what might be the problem?

[llasram]

Originally Posted by Abelturd

So my question is: doesn't Calibre support conversion from lrf to mobi yet or what might be the problem?

No, calibre does not support LRF as a source format. If you want to use BookIt with formats other than LRF, you'll need to get the BookIt author to add support for that.

[Gudy]

Originally Posted by Amalthia

Okay I tested this code.

p {
text-indent: 1em;
margin: 0;
}

and I tried

p {
text-indent: 1em;
}

and neither did anything to address the wide indent for every paragraph.

Unless I'm missing something major, the whole mechanism seems to be completely b0rked in 0.4.133.

I used "p { text-indent: 1em; margin: 0; }" in the CSS Override box with the "Remove spacing between paragraphs" option disabled, and didn't get any paragraph indent whatsoever. Running mobi2html on the resulting .mobi file showed all paragraphs as <p align="justify" height="1em" width="0pt"> which is... unexpected but matches the results, at least.

As a general usability complaint, I find it rather unacceptable that I need to resort to handcoding CSS in order to set something as basic as a paragraph indent in EPUB and MOBI files, especially since there is a far simpler way available for LRF files. In the same vein, having to use XPath expressions to detect chapter headings pretty much ensures that I will never use that feature in calibre but will instead hand-massage the html file before import.