Using Libprs500 for 505

[JeffASonyReader]

Hi, I installed Libprs500 today and have been using the "Fetch News".
Is there a way to speed it up? I'm on DSL. The CNN feed worked. CNN took about 8 minutes. Finally, the WSJ feed worked. WSJ took 21 minutes.

Agony. Can that be made shorter?

2nd question.
When I turn on my PRS-505 and go to the Wall Street Journal, it takes forever to format.
It says, "Formatting" and the progress arrows circle each other for - forever.

Any way to speed that up? Maybe if I preview it inside Libprs500 and then transfer it?

3rd question.
I'm finding that any ebook, generally, if over 1 mb, is taking too long to parse/format on the PRS-505 to wait to show up. Maybe 3 mb. For example, the Bible took forever.
The apocalypse might....ok, too easy to make a joke there.
Anyways, question is can I speed it up anyway? Or is this going with the territory?

[kovidgoyal]

You can speed up the initial parsing of large ebooks by transferring them using the SONY software, but that's about it.

[JeffASonyReader]

I'll give it a try, thanks. Sony said larger ebooks read much faster for page turns when they are coming from an SD card than from the internal memory. They also said SD reads are faster than memory stick. I'll try that too.

[mauibay]

Wow, I'm curious where you saw Sony say that! I've never seen any hint from them that SD outperformed their own MS format on the Reader! I'd love to know where they admitted it!

[JeffASonyReader]

On phone. . . .

[The Old Man]

Probably been asked before. I am new to all this neat stuff.
Just got the 505 and used the libprs500 for the first time.
What a terrific program!!! Thank you!!!

This question has probably been answered before but quickly searching the forum I could find no answer. Can I have a black and white picture in an HTML file that libprs500 will convert? I just converted the Gutenberg “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (HTML) made a few changes to the table that had the Table of Contents, etc. and the conversion was next to perfect. However, a small b/w jpg pic that I inserted in the HTML file does not show up in the conversion. Am I missing something or do pics not convert?
Thank you.

[kovidgoyal]

If you're converting an HTML file with links to pictures using the GUI you first have to create a ZIP file with the html file and any pictures in it, then run the conversion process on that.

[The Old Man]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you're converting an HTML file with links to pictures using the GUI you first have to create a ZIP file with the html file and any pictures in it, then run the conversion process on that.

That did it! Great! Thank you!

[The Old Man]

I know by asking these questions I am admitting my stupidity but here goes.

I’m using Libprs500 to convert an HTML file of poetry and I am a bit familiar with HTML coding. No expert but an advanced novice.

When choosing the Convert eBooks icon and then selecting the 4th icon on the left, Chapter conversion, I am presented with three blocks under the heading of Tag Based Detection. What I am trying to do is force a page break in both the reader PC software and the Reader 505 itself, no matter what size font is selected (S, M, L).

Putting the tag <h1> or <h2> in the code seems to work most of the time but not all. I assume this is what is meant by the h[12] in the first block. If not, what tag do I use?
I also assume the text within the <h1> needs an </h2> - correct?

I have no idea what the tags shown in the next to two blocks mean. They are:
$
and $,,$

So, basically, my question is what tag (specifically please for a dummy) do I insert in the HTML code to force a page break on the 505 both in the PC eBook software and on the 505 device? Forcing the break on the 505 is the most important to me.
Thank you.

[kovidgoyal]

Forcing a page break can be done by inserting a simple

<span style="page-break-after: always"></span>

The chapter detection options are for when you want libprs500 to guess where it should insert page breaks based on the contents of the file.

[The Old Man]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

Forcing a page break can be done by inserting a simple

<span style="page-break-after: always"></span>

The chapter detection options are for when you want libprs500 to guess where it should insert page breaks based on the contents of the file.

Sounds too easy. I will give it a try.
Thanks very much - again!

I am formatting Robert Service's "The Spell of the Yukon" and will eventually try and do many of his other poetry works once I get the hang of it.

[kovidgoyal]

You may find the example in the thread to be of some help,

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13085

[The Old Man]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

You may find the example in the thread to be of some help,

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13085

Yes, thanks for providing the source. I've pretty much conquered the beast and I'll post when I've gone through it once or twice more. I'm providing a way to return to the Contents after each poem if the reader desires and also trying not to divide the stanzas in the middle of a page for both S and M size displays.

I notice that the <p> puts a space or two before the paragraph which, for prose, is certainly correct, but for poetry it is mostly not wanted. I can see from the Wasted Land source how the problem was overcome. I may try to correct mine or just live with it as a first try.

[kati42]

An aside on HTML, etc.

Originally Posted by The Old Man

Putting the tag <h1> or <h2> in the code seems to work most of the time but not all. I assume this is what is meant by the h[12] in the first block. If not, what tag do I use?
I also assume the text within the <h1> needs an </h2> - correct?

h1 and h2 tags are used to emphasize headers (the 'h' stands for 'h'eader). So the idea is that a book will emphasize the chapter headings, and libprs will automatically insert the page break before them:

<h1>Chapter One</h1>
<p>It was a dark and stormy night...</p>

Note that a beginning <h1> tag needs to have an associated </h1> end tag. h2 is also a header tag, for subheadings. For example, you could have:

<h1>PART ONE</h1>
<h2>Chapter One</h2>
<p> It was a dark and stormy night...</p>

Note that the subheader has a beginning <h2> tag and an ending </h2> tag. Basically your "ending" tag needs to match your "beginning" tag.

The h[12] entry on libprs is something called a "regular expression" that tells it to find tags h1 or h2 (the values in the square bracket mean "any one of these"). So if you had an ebook where the chapter headings all used h1 tags, but there was setting or time information in h2 tags, like:

<h1>Chapter One</h1>
<h2>Living Room, 8pm</h2>
<p>It was a dark and stormy night...</p>

Then you would want to change h[12] to h[1] or h1, because you wouldn't want the page break before h2 tags.

Not sure that this information helps at all...

[The Old Man]

Thanks, Kati. My problem was inserting a page break that would force the Reader to a new page. Kovid supplied the answer above.

Robert W. Service's Spell of the Yukon, my first attempt in converting an HTML file to the Sony Reader.