I am getting strange characters when i load an ebook

[irow]

Hi

I am new here so I hope I posted in the right place.

I borrowed an epub ebook from my library to read and when i load it into the calibre library and double click on it, I get this:



I take it this is not normal? Can you tell me the exact step-by-step instructions to fix it? Calibre has a lot of settings and I feel overwhelmed looking at them.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by irow

Hi

I am new here so I hope I posted in the right place.

I borrowed an epub ebook from my library to read and when i load it into the calibre library and double click on it, I get this:



I take it this is not normal? Can you tell me the exact step-by-step instructions to fix it? Calibre has a lot of settings and I feel overwhelmed looking at them.

(force)Set the conversion Codepage option to CP1252 (there are balloon help hints for others, if that one does not solve it)
Those appear to be 'curly quotes" and your source does nt clearly define which CP was used. Calibre guessed wrong, so you need to force it

[irow]

ok, but can you tell me the exact step by step guide? i am new to this calibre program

this is what i see

[paw3pals]

Heuristic Processing solved this problem for me for one stubborn ePub file.

Select ebook, Convert books, Convert individually, select Heuristic Processing on the left and enable it.

Originally Posted by irow

Hi

I am new here so I hope I posted in the right place.

I borrowed an epub ebook from my library to read and when i load it into the calibre library and double click on it, I get this:



I take it this is not normal? Can you tell me the exact step-by-step instructions to fix it? Calibre has a lot of settings and I feel overwhelmed looking at them.

[irow]

it still doesn't work =(.

here is some addtional info, the book was originally for adobe digital editions, if that helps.

[Section8]

Ah - this solves a mystery I encountered a couple of months ago. I got an epub that rendered correctly in ADE, but looked like this in Calibre's viewer as well as my Sony T1 (which I understand is based on ADE).

I ended up just fixing these characters in Sigil (which also rendered those characters incorrectly). I would find a garbled character in Sigil, look at that page in ADE if I couldn't figure out from the context what it was supposed to be, and do a global replace in Sigil (across all html files) to change it to the equivalent html & code. These rendered correctly everywhere.

I think I found them all, but haven't read the book yet to be sure.

[kiwidude]

I don't recommend you use heuristics to solve this - it will change other things about your ebook which you don't want changed. Heuristics are intended to "guess" their way to a better structure and will do nasty things if you have the wrong options ticked - if the structure is fine to begin with you will end up with something worse than what you started.

The suggestion by theducks is spot on for 99% of these cases. Just open the conversion dialog, at the top choose to do an epub to epub conversion, click on the "Look & Feel" tab, and in the fifth box down where it says "Input character encoding" change it to "cp1252" and do your conversion.

There are still some circumstances where that won't fix the issue, usually because someone has mangled things even further along the way. In that scenario I use Tweak ePub, open all the html files up in Notepad++, do a bulk find/replace across the files after fiddling with the encodings and saving them as utf-8. It's a pain but it is the minority of times this needs to be done.

[irow]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

I don't recommend you use heuristics to solve this - it will change other things about your ebook which you don't want changed. Heuristics are intended to "guess" their way to a better structure and will do nasty things if you have the wrong options ticked - if the structure is fine to begin with you will end up with something worse than what you started.

The suggestion by theducks is spot on for 99% of these cases. Just open the conversion dialog, at the top choose to do an epub to epub conversion, click on the "Look & Feel" tab, and in the fifth box down where it says "Input character encoding" change it to "cp1252" and do your conversion.

There are still some circumstances where that won't fix the issue, usually because someone has mangled things even further along the way. In that scenario I use Tweak ePub, open all the html files up in Notepad++, do a bulk find/replace across the files after fiddling with the encodings and saving them as utf-8. It's a pain but it is the minority of times this needs to be done.

yes!!! this worked, thanks for the advice!