Strange Goings On

[Tango Mike]

Calibre on an OS 10.6 Mac converting .doc files to .epub is doing something baffling.

I've converted about fifty books, and sometimes when I load the filtered .htm into Calibre for conversion, it appears with my name listed in the title field rather than the title. I've been entering the real title, the author, and the publisher and proceeding with the conversion.

The resulting .epub (and .mobi) files have appeared without glitches of any kind in Kindle for Mac, Adobe Digital Editions, and on Kindles, Nooks, and iPads.

Yesterday I was informed that a book I had converted to .epub had my name inserted in the metadata for each of the linked chapter headings, twice for each heading. The author jokingly accused me of trying to take over the e-publishing universe.

I just now opened that .epub in Sigil, and in the "all HTML" view confirmed that is indeed the case. I then used Sigil to open the .htm file used to create the .epub, and my name appears nowhere in the html. This seems evidence enough that Calibre is the culprit.

Has anyone ever heard of this, and can you tell me how to avoid/fix it without having to revise the html (which I'm not knowledgeable enough to do)?

Any suggestions would be appreciated, thanks.

[jackie_w]

I'm not sure whether my experience is relevant as I am not a Mac user and my copy of MSWord is very old (v10). Before saving my .doc files to filtered-html I always go into File - Properties (in MSWord) and type the correct Title and Author. The Author field is set to my name by default.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Tango Mike

I just now opened that .epub in Sigil, and in the "all HTML" view confirmed that is indeed the case. I then used Sigil to open the .htm file used to create the .epub, and my name appears nowhere in the html. This seems evidence enough that Calibre is the culprit.

Calibre does not insert any info into any conversion that you didn't put there. That said, stray plugins that you might have been practicing on could still be laying around the plugins directory and affecting things.

To narrow it down you could try the portable version of calibre. This would be a clean copy of calibre without any odd plugins or settings in the configuration folder. Add the html, do the conversion and see what happens.

Edit: The portable version may just be for Windows? If this is the case go to Preferences - Miscellaneous and open the configuration folder. Leave this open and exit calibre, rename the folder, then restart calibre. When asked point calibre to your library. You now have a brand new configuration. Add the html and convert again. If this makes no difference then it is time to look outside of calibre.

You can always exit calibre and rename the old configuration folder back to its previous name and be right back to the setup you had prior to this experiment.