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Old 08-22-2010, 03:53 PM   #1
lunixer
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Exclamation conversion to txt or rtf makes empty file

Hi there! I just upgraded my Calibre from 0.6.X to 0.7.15 today. I previously was using the version from my Ubuntu repositories but now I am using the version from the Calibre website.

The upgrade solved my main problem, which was that the program was crashing frequently. However, it created another problem. Now, whenever I try to convert a book to rtf or txt so that I can edit it, it creates a file of that filetype that only has either rtf or txt in it. That is, that's all that the file says

Is there any way I can solve this? I've tried converting tens of files without success. It's really annoying because now I can't edit my files. Any help would be immensely appreciated!
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:07 PM   #2
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what sort of file are you trying to convert?
i'm asking because if it's PDF you can simply use the "save as.." function (even if all you have is the Acrobat Reader---it saves as .txt format) and you;ll bypass Calibre altogether.
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:09 PM   #3
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Originally Posted by TenaciousBadger View Post
what sort of file are you trying to convert?
i'm asking because if it's PDF you can simply use the "save as.." function (even if all you have is the Acrobat Reader) and you;ll bypass Calibre altogether
I never touch PDFs. I'm just trying to convert .mobi .lit and .epub files so that I can edit them and take out the junk at the beginning (publication page, maps, author information and the like). I like my books to start right at the story. But thanks for the suggestion.
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:13 PM   #4
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you've got a corrupted install, probably because you're mixing two version of calibre one from the repo and the binary. Did you properly uninstall the old version before installing the new?
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:14 PM   #5
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for LIT you can use ConvertLIT GUI (you can use google to find it) and it will convert your LITs in HTML from where it's easy to just copy-paste it into a TXT or DOC/RTF file.
it's small, easy to use and disease-free . i myself use it quite a lot.

for the .mobi and .epub.. unfortunately i use Calibre for those too (but i haven't updated it yet)
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:15 PM   #6
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Originally Posted by kovidgoyal View Post
you've got a corrupted install, probably because you're mixing two version of calibre one from the repo and the binary. Did you properly uninstall the old version before installing the new?
No. If I uninstall everything now will I lose my preferences/database and the like? I don't want to lose my preferences because I just spent two hours or so going through the collection and making sure everything is formatted correctly. Thank you so much for the excellent software and the support you give the users.
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:19 PM   #7
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no uninstalling doesn't remove any user data.
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Old 08-22-2010, 05:31 PM   #8
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Works now after reinstall. But it is telling me that a few of the rtf files are corrupt. And I can read the .mobi from which I converted them. But it's better than before. Thank you.
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Old 08-23-2010, 02:26 PM   #9
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Works now after reinstall. But it is telling me that a few of the rtf files are corrupt. And I can read the .mobi from which I converted them. But it's better than before. Thank you.
Okay, since I did this I've been having a lot more problems. Now almost none of the rtf files that I create work. When I try to open them in Word I always get a "corrupt file" error and a "file format error" when I try to open them in Open Office Word. I'm sure that the problem is not with the files. I have observed this in most of my collection (250+ books). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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Old 08-23-2010, 03:16 PM   #10
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I had that problem when I had a hard drive problem. Many of my books were corrupted and a few that I could read the mobi/epub etc would give me a corrupted rtf output.
I reimported the originals after deleting all formats and that was ok.
Hope your problem is simpler.
I was fortunate that I had a recent backup and only had to redo about 200
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Old 08-25-2010, 04:56 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal View Post
you've got a corrupted install, probably because you're mixing two version of calibre one from the repo and the binary. Did you properly uninstall the old version before installing the new?
I uninstalled and reinstalled 3 times now, and each time made sure that *everything* was gone from my previous install. The program is still either giving me a blank rtf or txt output or, on occasion, giving me a corrupt rtf output. Is there anything else that I can try to fix this problem?

EDIT: I am also getting much more frequent errors that look like this:
Code:
ERROR: Could not open ebook: unpack requires a string argument of length 2

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/kovid/build/calibre/src/calibre/gui2/viewer/main.py", line 61, in run
  File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/threading.py", line 477, in run
    del _limbo[self]
  File "/home/kovid/build/calibre/src/calibre/ebooks/oeb/iterator.py", line 192, in __enter__
  File "/home/kovid/build/calibre/src/calibre/customize/conversion.py", line 211, in __call__
  File "/home/kovid/build/calibre/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/input.py", line 26, in convert
  File "/home/kovid/build/calibre/src/calibre/ebooks/mobi/reader.py", line 263, in __init__
error: unpack requires a string argument of length 2

Last edited by lunixer; 08-25-2010 at 05:08 PM.
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