Editing conversion of PDF to EPUB

[Cleophauna]

I converted a PDF to EPUB. (using Calibre)The only problem Is that a couple of chapters converted every sentence to a paragraph as well as individual words to paragraphs. I unzipped and edited the individual html files, didn't change any filenames, rezipped and the chapters I edited now don't show up when opening the epub. Did I miss something? I used kompozer to edit the files. This is my first attempt at editing. This type of problem is extremely annoying to me, which prompted me to learning how to correct it.

I assumed that as long as I didn't change any structure, or filenames I'd be safe. But you know what they say when you "Assume".

[itimpi]

Probably a better less error-prone way would be to use Sigil (an open source epub WYSWIG editor) to do the editing after conversion to ePub. That would ensure that everything stayed properly epub compatible.

[Cleophauna]

Thanks, I finally found some other posts that suggested converting to RTF, cleanup and then convert to EPUB. In this instance it worked just fine. The spacing is still off a little bit, but tolerable.

I still would like to know why editing the html file messed the book up. Maybe it's a calibre thing. I haven't tried it on an original epub yet. No reason to

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by Cleophauna

I still would like to know why editing the html file messed the book up. Maybe it's a calibre thing. I haven't tried it on an original epub yet. No reason to

I guess the question is "what HTML file"? I had assumed that you opened up the ePub file to edit the contained HTML files? If that was the case then Calibre was no longer involved so if anything went wrong it was something you did during the edit. However maybe there was a step you left out in your original description that gave you the HTML file?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Cleophauna

Thanks, I finally found some other posts that suggested converting to RTF, cleanup and then convert to EPUB. In this instance it worked just fine. The spacing is still off a little bit, but tolerable.

I still would like to know why editing the html file messed the book up. Maybe it's a calibre thing. I haven't tried it on an original epub yet. No reason to

Did you use Tweak EPUB feature of Calibre to explode and reassemble the EPUB?
EPUB is sensitive to specific assembly rules that a basic Zip does not follow.

[Cleophauna]

I used calibre to convert from pdf to epub. I then manually unzipped and edited outside of calibre. I used kompozor to edit the individual html files and then used xp's zip to put back into a zip file. Wasn't aware that I could do all that from within calibre.

So it could be using an external zip program messed it up? I thought that as long as I didn't mess with file names, the structure would be safe.

This whole epub structure thing has somewhat of a learning curve, but, I'm jumping in anyway.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Cleophauna

I used calibre to convert from pdf to epub. I then manually unzipped and edited outside of calibre. I used kompozor to edit the individual html files and then used xp's zip to put back into a zip file. Wasn't aware that I could do all that from within calibre.

So it could be using an external zip program messed it up? I thought that as long as I didn't mess with file names, the structure would be safe.

This whole epub structure thing has somewhat of a learning curve, but, I'm jumping in anyway.

Since you have Calibre, use the built in tool (Tweak EPUB) to do that wor
km.
You can still edit the pieces with Komposer , Then reassemble using the (still open) Tweak Tool.
The file name rule still applies if you don't want to dig into the 2 other files (OPF, NCX)

[Cleophauna]

Off to try again with Tweak EPUB. Thanks for the info.