How to convert an ebook from .epub to .fb2? - Page 2

BobC · 03-28-2016, 01:10 PM

Just to give you an idea how fb2 likes footnotes to look here is an example

This is the text which refers to the footnotes:

Code:

<empty-line/>
<p>Welsh genealogists of repute concur however in stating that he was the eldest son of Robert Morgan of Llanrhymney, a small estate in Glamorganshire, near Tredegar Castle, where he was born in 1635.<a l:href="#n1" type="note">[1]</a> The year of his birth is ascertained with tolerable certainty as an affidavit made by him in Jamaica on the 21st November, 1671, definitely states his age as thirty-six.</p>
<empty-line/>
<p>The family of Tredegar was recognized as the head of the clan, of which the Morgans of Llanrhymney were a cadet branch. In a poem, entitled "Prosopoeia Tredegar", believed to have been written by Percy Enderby about 1661, the following lines occur:</p>
<empty-line/>
<poem><stanza>
<v>"And so LanRumney yet must bend the knee,</v>
<v>And from Tredegar fetch their pedigree."<a l:href="#n2" type="note">[2]</a></v>

You will see the form that the originating anchor takes.

And the following fragment are the footnotes themselves :

Code:

</section>
</body>
<body name="notes">
<title>
<p>Notes</p>
</title>
<section id="n1">
<title>
<p>1</p>
</title>
<p> Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiæ; A. Morgan, History of the Family of Morgan.</p>
</section>
<section id="n2">
<title>
<p>2</p>
</title>
<p> G. Blacker Morgan, Historical and Genealogical Memoirs of the Morgan Family, pp. 5-6.</p>
</section>
<section id="n3">
<title>
<p>3</p>
</title>
<p> E. E. Cuthell, A Vagabond Courtier, Vol. I, p. 3; C. E. Long, "Memoir of Henry Morgan" in Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1832; Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1663, No. 601.</p>
</section>
.........

You can see they reside in a part of the file with a body name of "notes".

With footnotes formatted like this Coolreader will display them at the bottom of the page. The point here is that Word Processing files such as odt know just what is a foornote/endnote (as opposed to a simple link) and can make the necessary conversion. AFAICS EPUBS (at least EPUB2) have no real concept of a foot/endnote, only of hyperlinks to another location so it is not unreasonable that they cannot convert properly or even distinguish between links you are supposed to follow and ones where the intent is that it will display "footnote-style" at the bottom of the referring page.

This is also why you need to get the book to display footnotes as end-of-page notes in LO before you start to convert to fb2.

The footnote tools in OOOFBTOOLS are designed to handle simple text sources that look something like this :

Code:

Welsh genealogists of repute concur however in stating that he was the eldest son of Robert Morgan of Llanrhymney, a small estate in Glamorganshire, near Tredegar Castle, where he was born in 1635.[1] The year of his birth is ascertained with tolerable certainty as an affidavit made by him in Jamaica on the 21st November, 1671, definitely states his age as thirty-six.</p>

and link it to the relevant footnote formatted like this :

Code:

[1] Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiæ; A. Morgan, History of the Family of Morgan.

To do this you need to define two areas -
1)the chapter start where the references are
2) an area where the footnotes formatted as above can be found.

This is because in the case of footnote (not endnotes) the references will probably be duplicated with say 20 Footnote 1s , one in each chapter.

I'm labouring this as the instructions for OOOFBTOOLS are a bit difficult to follow as the tool was originally Russian (as is so much fb2).

If you are lucky and you have sequentially numbered endnotes (all the notes in a single section at the end) you can process everything in one step rather than on a chapter by chapter basis. I have a book where I did this with 625 footnotes - all in one operation.

I hope this is reasonably clear - shout if you need any help. I have a copy of an English translation of "Rhetoric" which I was going to send you as I had alreay converted it to fb2 but when I examined it and the source I got it from there were no footnotes in it.

BobC

RbnJrg · 03-28-2016, 09:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BobC

...
I hope this is reasonably clear - shout if you need any help. I have a copy of an English translation of "Rhetoric" which I was going to send you as I had alreay converted it to fb2 but when I examined it and the source I got it from there were no footnotes in it.

BobC

Hi Bob;

Many thanks for your good will. I made some progress; with Jutoh I could convert an epub in a practically perfect .odt (I need to change -with S&R- a couple of styles to get a very good .fb2 with OOOFbtool). Just one lack: Jutoh convert epub links not in LibreOffice Writer footnotes but in hiperlinks (working hiperlinks). The format of those hiperlinks is:

Code:

This is the text blah, blah, blah¹

where the superscript is the link to:

Code:

¹ This is the note

Sometimes the number in enclosed in square brackets (also in superscript format).
Can you explain me again how to use the toolbar of OOOFbtool to convert those links in Writer footnotes?

Thank you very much in advance.
Rubén

BobC · 03-29-2016, 04:22 AM

Reuben,

I'll put together an explanation of how to use the tools - PM me your email address so I can let you have it. I'll have to do it as a odt document to be able to explain things sensibly without falling foul of the image size restrictions on MobileRead.

The tools will handle the superscripted cross-references but if they are in square brackets you might have to regex the brackets out.

I've started on the document but it will probably be tomorrow before I can send it as I need to revise up on the terms it uses and work out some examples. So I can concentrate on the options you need can you tell me :

1 are the cross-references in superscript hyperlinked ?
2 are the footnotes on a per-chapter basis or sequential through the entire document ?. If per-chapter are the footnotes themselves at the end of each chapter or in sections at the end of the book ?

BobC

RbnJrg · 03-29-2016, 07:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BobC

Reuben,

I'll put together an explanation of how to use the tools - PM me your email address so I can let you have it. I'll have to do it as a odt document to be able to explain things sensibly without falling foul of the image size restrictions on MobileRead.

Ok, I'll send you my email address.

Quote:

The tools will handle the superscripted cross-references but if they are in square brackets you might have to regex the brackets out.

No problem with that.

Quote:

I've started on the document but it will probably be tomorrow before I can send it as I need to revise up on the terms it uses and work out some examples.

I'm not in a hurry, so take all the time you need.

Quote:

So I can concentrate on the options you need can you tell me :

1 are the cross-references in superscript hyperlinked ?
2 are the footnotes on a per-chapter basis or sequential through the entire document? If per-chapter are the footnotes themselves at the end of each chapter or in sections at the end of the book ?

1. Yes.
2. They are sequentialy numbered through the entire document. All the notes are in a separate .xhtml file (in the epub) at the end of the ebook.

Many many thanks for your help.
Rubén

RbnJrg · 03-29-2016, 03:50 PM

Thank you very much Bob!! It's a real pity that what you sent me can't be posted here. Your tutorial would be really very useful to all those who want to transform an epub in a fb2 with footnotes at the end of the respective pages. Many thanks again for your help!

Rubén

PeterT · 03-29-2016, 04:58 PM

Nothing prevents it being posted here. The only restriction is on inline images. Images that are attachments can be posted....

DaleDe · 03-29-2016, 05:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BobC

Reuben,

I'll put together an explanation of how to use the tools - PM me your email address so I can let you have it. I'll have to do it as a odt document to be able to explain things sensibly without falling foul of the image size restrictions on MobileRead.

The tools will handle the superscripted cross-references but if they are in square brackets you might have to regex the brackets out.

I've started on the document but it will probably be tomorrow before I can send it as I need to revise up on the terms it uses and work out some examples. So I can concentrate on the options you need can you tell me :

1 are the cross-references in superscript hyperlinked ?
2 are the footnotes on a per-chapter basis or sequential through the entire document ?. If per-chapter are the footnotes themselves at the end of each chapter or in sections at the end of the book ?

BobC

It might be better in the wiki or post it both places for long term use.

Dale

RbnJrg · 03-29-2016, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It might be better in the wiki or post it both places for long term use.

Dale

Yes, that would be a good possibility. The images of the tutorial makes it almost impossible to post it here, online. Basically the procedure to transform an epub in a fb2 (with footnotes at the end of the page) is:

1. To convert the epub in an .odt (LibreOffice) document with Jutoh (it makes a great .odt with working hyperlinks).
2. To open the .odt with LO and by S&R, to change styles h1, h2, h3, etc., with styles Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.
3. To transform the .odt hyperlinks (endnotes in the original epub) in footnotes with the aid of OOOFbtool extension of LO. (Here is the tutorial that BobC wrote.)
4. To build the .fb2 also with OOOFbtool.

The whole work, it takes no more than 10 minutes. But of course, all the credit belongs to BobC. I think that he won't have any problem to allow his tutorial will be published in the Wiki of the forum.

EDIT: It's a piece of cake. It's not neccessary Jutoh; Calibre makes a great conversion from epub to docx and LibreOffice can open that docx so OOOFBtools can make its magic.

Quote:

Originally Posted by BetterRed

RbnJrg - FWIW : calibre will preserve the links when converting EPUB to DOCX, perhaps there's something that will convert the DOCX to FB2. Not calibre of course, I would guess that its 'problem' converting from EPUB is in its FB2 Output module.

Sometimes it takes two leaps to cross a yawning chasm

BR

You were right! In my previous answer I wasn't aware of OOOFBtools; now it's easy to convert that .docx in .fb2

BobC · 03-30-2016, 04:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It might be better in the wiki or post it both places for long term use.

Dale

Perhaps I should explain -
I didn't set out to explain the use of OOOFBTools, only to give guidance on the way to use the footnote conversion part of the tool, and even then only really enough to overcome RbnJrg's immediate problem.

I put together the document in odt form so that it could include a workable example that could be used in conjunction with the tool. It was what I would consider a "quick and dirty" explanation to meet a specific problem.

Although I used fb2 extensively some years ago as it is an easy format to edit (all you need is a text editor) I've found little evidence that the MR community does so, indeed I've shifted to EPUB because of the limitations of fb2. In reality though, the OOOFBTools extension is a valuable add-on to LibreOffice and I use many other facilities it provides when working on EPUB conversions. I have mentioned this use a few times in reply to other posts but have had no responses so have assumed that either folk who used LO as a word processor as opposed to MS Word either were aware of it or had no use for it. There is actually a Google Group in English (most other documentation is in Russian) dedicated to the tool, however it has only four members, the owner, a developer, myself and one other and has had no activity for the last three years.

With this in mind, while I'm flattered that there is a suggestion that the document would be worthy of a Wiki entry I think it would need a bit more work to make it more generally useful.

I have attached a copy of the original document (it's zipped up because of MR attachment limitations) and I would be happy to assist anyone who feels a need to include it in a Wiki entry or some other general guidance document. At least it cannot contain any glaring errors as RbnJrg seems to have used it successfully.

Overall my EPUB production generally uses three add-ons for LO -
OOOFBtools
Tomas Bilek's Alternative Search (extensive stored regex S&R)
Writer2xhtml - this adds an EPUB export filter

These provide most facilities I need to manipulate text (often poor OCR output) into a final EPUB document that can be fine-tuned with Calibre/Sigil.

BobC

jbacelar · 03-30-2016, 11:41 AM

Bob, thank you very much for your great contribution, and the same for Rubén for opening this thread.

Farewell to the hours spent in doing all this with Notepad ++

BobC · 03-30-2016, 12:58 PM

Shows how memory fades with time, have a look at this thread :

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...681#post754681

I'd forgotten I'd covered this back in 2010. It also shows that if you don't know what you are searching for you probably won't find it

BobC

p.s. and this was me looking for some help a few days earlier :

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70413

DaleDe · 03-30-2016, 01:00 PM

The wiki is for everyone. Anybody can add a page or many pages to the wiki so long as it is in some way related to eBooks, eBook technology, or background for these topics. It is a resource for the entire community. Articles are not measured to see if they are worthy, only if they are useful. Some seem reluctant but everyone is welcomed.

Dale

03-28-2016, 01:10 PM	#16
BobC Guru Posts: 691 Karma: 3026110 Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Lancashire, U.K. Device: BeBook 1, BeBook Pure, Kobo Glo, (and HD),Energy Sistem EReader Pro +	Just to give you an idea how fb2 likes footnotes to look here is an example This is the text which refers to the footnotes: Code: <empty-line/> <p>Welsh genealogists of repute concur however in stating that he was the eldest son of Robert Morgan of Llanrhymney, a small estate in Glamorganshire, near Tredegar Castle, where he was born in 1635.<a l:href="#n1" type="note">[1]</a> The year of his birth is ascertained with tolerable certainty as an affidavit made by him in Jamaica on the 21st November, 1671, definitely states his age as thirty-six.</p> <empty-line/> <p>The family of Tredegar was recognized as the head of the clan, of which the Morgans of Llanrhymney were a cadet branch. In a poem, entitled "Prosopoeia Tredegar", believed to have been written by Percy Enderby about 1661, the following lines occur:</p> <empty-line/> <poem><stanza> <v>"And so LanRumney yet must bend the knee,</v> <v>And from Tredegar fetch their pedigree."<a l:href="#n2" type="note">[2]</a></v> You will see the form that the originating anchor takes. And the following fragment are the footnotes themselves : Code: </section> </body> <body name="notes"> <title> <p>Notes</p> </title> <section id="n1"> <title> <p>1</p> </title> <p> Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiæ; A. Morgan, History of the Family of Morgan.</p> </section> <section id="n2"> <title> <p>2</p> </title> <p> G. Blacker Morgan, Historical and Genealogical Memoirs of the Morgan Family, pp. 5-6.</p> </section> <section id="n3"> <title> <p>3</p> </title> <p> E. E. Cuthell, A Vagabond Courtier, Vol. I, p. 3; C. E. Long, "Memoir of Henry Morgan" in Gentleman's Magazine, February, 1832; Calendar of State Papers, America and West Indies, 1663, No. 601.</p> </section> ......... You can see they reside in a part of the file with a body name of "notes". With footnotes formatted like this Coolreader will display them at the bottom of the page. The point here is that Word Processing files such as odt know just what is a foornote/endnote (as opposed to a simple link) and can make the necessary conversion. AFAICS EPUBS (at least EPUB2) have no real concept of a foot/endnote, only of hyperlinks to another location so it is not unreasonable that they cannot convert properly or even distinguish between links you are supposed to follow and ones where the intent is that it will display "footnote-style" at the bottom of the referring page. This is also why you need to get the book to display footnotes as end-of-page notes in LO before you start to convert to fb2. The footnote tools in OOOFBTOOLS are designed to handle simple text sources that look something like this : Code: Welsh genealogists of repute concur however in stating that he was the eldest son of Robert Morgan of Llanrhymney, a small estate in Glamorganshire, near Tredegar Castle, where he was born in 1635.[1] The year of his birth is ascertained with tolerable certainty as an affidavit made by him in Jamaica on the 21st November, 1671, definitely states his age as thirty-six.</p> and link it to the relevant footnote formatted like this : Code: [1] Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiæ; A. Morgan, History of the Family of Morgan. To do this you need to define two areas - 1)the chapter start where the references are 2) an area where the footnotes formatted as above can be found. This is because in the case of footnote (not endnotes) the references will probably be duplicated with say 20 Footnote 1s , one in each chapter. I'm labouring this as the instructions for OOOFBTOOLS are a bit difficult to follow as the tool was originally Russian (as is so much fb2). If you are lucky and you have sequentially numbered endnotes (all the notes in a single section at the end) you can process everything in one step rather than on a chapter by chapter basis. I have a book where I did this with 625 footnotes - all in one operation. I hope this is reasonably clear - shout if you need any help. I have a copy of an English translation of "Rhetoric" which I was going to send you as I had alreay converted it to fb2 but when I examined it and the source I got it from there were no footnotes in it. BobC Last edited by BobC; 03-28-2016 at 01:13 PM. Reason: Submitted when I should have previewed (i.e. it wasn't finished)

03-29-2016, 04:22 AM	#18
BobC Guru Posts: 691 Karma: 3026110 Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Lancashire, U.K. Device: BeBook 1, BeBook Pure, Kobo Glo, (and HD),Energy Sistem EReader Pro +	Reuben, I'll put together an explanation of how to use the tools - PM me your email address so I can let you have it. I'll have to do it as a odt document to be able to explain things sensibly without falling foul of the image size restrictions on MobileRead. The tools will handle the superscripted cross-references but if they are in square brackets you might have to regex the brackets out. I've started on the document but it will probably be tomorrow before I can send it as I need to revise up on the terms it uses and work out some examples. So I can concentrate on the options you need can you tell me : 1 are the cross-references in superscript hyperlinked ? 2 are the footnotes on a per-chapter basis or sequential through the entire document ?. If per-chapter are the footnotes themselves at the end of each chapter or in sections at the end of the book ? BobC Last edited by BobC; 03-29-2016 at 04:34 AM. Reason: Request for further information

03-30-2016, 12:58 PM	#26
BobC Guru Posts: 691 Karma: 3026110 Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Lancashire, U.K. Device: BeBook 1, BeBook Pure, Kobo Glo, (and HD),Energy Sistem EReader Pro +	Shows how memory fades with time, have a look at this thread : https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...681#post754681 I'd forgotten I'd covered this back in 2010. It also shows that if you don't know what you are searching for you probably won't find it BobC p.s. and this was me looking for some help a few days earlier : https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=70413 Last edited by BobC; 03-30-2016 at 01:03 PM.

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03-29-2016, 03:50 PM	#20
RbnJrg Wizard Posts: 1,548 Karma: 6613969 Join Date: Mar 2013 Location: Rosario - Santa Fe - Argentina Device: Kindle 4 NT	Thank you very much Bob!! It's a real pity that what you sent me can't be posted here. Your tutorial would be really very useful to all those who want to transform an epub in a fb2 with footnotes at the end of the respective pages. Many thanks again for your help! Rubén

03-29-2016, 04:58 PM	#21
PeterT Grand Sorcerer Posts: 12,171 Karma: 73448616 Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Toronto Device: Nexus 7, Clara, Touch, Tolino EPOS	Nothing prevents it being posted here. The only restriction is on inline images. Images that are attachments can be posted....

03-30-2016, 11:41 AM	#25
jbacelar Interested in the matter Posts: 421 Karma: 426094 Join Date: Dec 2011 Location: Spain, south coast Device: Pocketbook InkPad 3	Bob, thank you very much for your great contribution, and the same for Rubén for opening this thread. Farewell to the hours spent in doing all this with Notepad ++

03-30-2016, 01:00 PM	#27
DaleDe Grand Sorcerer Posts: 11,470 Karma: 13095790 Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Grass Valley, CA Device: EB 1150, EZ Reader, Literati, iPad 2 & Air 2, iPhone 7	The wiki is for everyone. Anybody can add a page or many pages to the wiki so long as it is in some way related to eBooks, eBook technology, or background for these topics. It is a resource for the entire community. Articles are not measured to see if they are worthy, only if they are useful. Some seem reluctant but everyone is welcomed. Dale