hello fb2 questions. calibre thoughts as well.

[oncdoc]

I use calibre to convert to fb2. easiest method. I never did book designer to work.

now question number one : is there a way to convert pdf to fb2 without hyphenation. When i turn the hyphenation off on my pocket pro (astak). ie default is Russion_English, that does not appear to work.

secondly, are you guys personally satisfied with calibre conversion to fb2??

poll as well.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by oncdoc

I use calibre to convert to fb2. easiest method. I never did book designer to work.

BookDesigner works great for me when I use it for cleaning up a file before making an FB2 book. I have just started with the OpenOffice FB2 plug-in, so I am not as proficient with it yet. I almost always start with the HTML output of MobiPocket Creator when I do a PDF to anything conversion.

Originally Posted by oncdoc

now question number one : is there a way to convert pdf to fb2 without hyphenation.

I may have just been lucky, but I have not run into much of a problem with extraneous hyphens. It should be easy enough to remove hard coded hyphens with Book Designer or OpenOffice?

Originally Posted by oncdoc

When i turn the hyphenation off on my pocket pro (astak). ie default is Russion_English, that does not appear to work.

If the hyphens are hard coded in the file, then turning off hyphenation in CoolReader will have no effect on hard coded hyphens. Turning off hyphenation in CoolReader only disables the automatic generation of hyphens.

Originally Posted by oncdoc

secondly, are you guys personally satisfied with calibre conversion to fb2??

Definitely not!

[BobC]

Personally I find PDF is a pretty poor starting point for converting ebooks, mainly because of the problem of properly identifying paragraphs which should re-flow. I'd rather work with a clean pure-text file than PDFs. However that doesn't address your problem.

Like Dave_S I used to use Book Designer but I have moved over to using the OpenOffice plug-in which, when teamed up with the AltSearch plug-in gives excellent capabilities for converting texts etc. One reason I prefer this approach is that one size doesn't fit all - IMO you need to examine the document you have and decide how best to convert it. Typically does it have italics, are there chunks of text that need formatting as "cite" or "poem" or even as tables, are there footnotes that need handling; some of these cannot be automated fully or you need an intermediate step before getting rid of all the line breaks. Some things I do using the AltSearch macros others I use the OOOFBTools text correction facilities - it has special facilities for handling hyphens where they have been hard coded into the text (typical if the source is OCR'd).

If your source is a PDF and there are no restrictions on it you might be able to simply highlight the text then copy and paste it into OOO - that way, unlike extracting the text (using "Save as Text" in Acrobat Reader), you will at least preserve the italics. Almost certainly you will need to manually remove all page headers and footers (including page numbers) unless you are very adept with RegExps and can automate the task.

I did a short guide to the OOO approach and you should be able to find it by searching the forums for OOOFBTOOLS as there is little English documentation on the subject.

Calibre - while a good tool for some formats has only incorporated fb2 recently and I have commented on a few occasions that the code it produces for fb2 is very poor - often failing quite elementary validation and using markup that doesn't appear in the fb2 Schema.

BobC

[oncdoc]

looks like calibre wins. simple to use, usually wins.

[rbruce1314]

I use Calibre to convert to fb2 for use with zxreader on a nokia 5800. The output is perfect on screen using calibre reader but once on the zxreader there are allsorts of problems with "ff", "fl", apostrohe etc. This is despite setting characterset to UTF8 as specified.

I suspect the probem is in zxreader, but seeing the above I am not sure.

[Dave_S]

Originally Posted by rbruce1314

I use Calibre to convert to fb2 for use with zxreader on a nokia 5800. The output is perfect on screen using calibre reader but once on the zxreader there are allsorts of problems with "ff", "fl", apostrohe etc. This is despite setting characterset to UTF8 as specified.

I suspect the probem is in zxreader, but seeing the above I am not sure.

There might be a way that you can test it. The UTF-8 coding has a lot of character codes and your font may not support all of them correctly. FB2 is actually just a text file with XML markup codes. To test, you could load the FB2 file into a text editor like NotePad++ using the same font that your device is using and see how the characters are displayed in the text editor. If the font can not display the characters there, then you can assume your problem is in the font's ability to display the required UTF-8 characters. IF your language is English then the ANSI character set is much smaller and should display correctly with most any font, but you will be missing some more advanced character formatting.
While you are in the FB2 file with a text editor you can also see what a mess Calibre makes of following the FB2 Schema.