Web2FB2 converts web pages to FB2 and EPUB files

[Xochipilli2012]

Greetings,

This is probably "old news" for most of you, but in my exploration of the FB2 eBook format, re-invigorated by the additional capabilities of the upgraded CoolReader software in the March 2010 firmware update, I discovered a really fun website.

http://web2fb2.net/

You enter the URL of a page you'd like to convert and it offers you an FB2 (zipped) and/or EPUB file for download. It only captures the top level of the site so if follows none of the links. But for grabbing a Wikipedia article or an essay to read later, it works great. While it offers some choices for tweaking the output, for most of the things I've tried the default settings work just fine.

And...It's free, although there is a PayPal donation link if you are so inclined.

I imagine similar things could be done with Calibre, although when I first attempted this I was very new to the program and failed miserably.

But this solution is so easy; even I can do it.

Enjoy!

[jusmee]

Interesting.

What does it do with links? If it follows them and puts the linked pages into the ebook, you could end up with a large book, on the other hand, if it doesn't follow links at all, it wouldn't work for web sites arranged, for example, as a TOC with chapter links.

[Xochipilli2012]

I think it just ignores links--which seems like the "right thing" to do, under the circumstances. Nonetheless, if you want to grab a Wikipedia article, or if another piece has a "printer version" and you feed that URL to this engine, it spits out a very readable version on the Astak EZReader Pocket Pro.

[jusmee]

Originally Posted by Xochipilli2012

I think it just ignores links--which seems like the "right thing" to do, under the circumstances.

There are other options. If you look at other software that is used to 'archive' web pages for offline reading, you will see config options for how many levels deep to follow links, and whether to stay in the same domain or not, etc.

Plucker is a fine example of this http://www.plkr.org/

I wonder if the PP will read plucker format?

[Xochipilli2012]

I have used Plucker in the past, and I think if you were to zip up a directory structure of a site that didn't go too many levels deep, like something akin to a TOC with target pages, you could probably successfully run the whole thing through Calibre and wind up with a workable eBook as a result. My initial attempts were (possibly) too ambitious and Calibre kicked out errors and didn't complete the conversion. It's certainly worthy of further experimentation.

This approach is "superior" for single level, "page-only" conversions because it's so easy. You can literally save the compressed FB2 files right to your Pocket Pro and head out the door in seconds. Plucker would be overkill for something like that, and it would still require secondary conversion if you wanted to bring images along. (At least, my limited experience with HTML on the Pocket Pro suggests that it can't handle a multi-file web page; I could be wrong about this.)

[hidari]

Ta for the link. heard of it but PP is my first reader that can read Fb2 decently. I like that it only saves one page.

[Xochipilli2012]

I also found a nifty Freeware program that is expressly designed to save Wikipedia pages to an FB2 document:

http://alexcomputing.com/wiki2fb2.html

Kind of cool....