Access to intermediate HTML files used in conversion

[CheriePie]

I apologize if this has been addressed elsewhere. A search didn't turn up an answer and I didn't feel like reading thru all the pages of the sticky FAQ in here again (plus that thread didn't come up in my search anyway).

So how do I get access to the intermediary HTML files that Calibre uses when converting from one format to another?

I've got a few books I'm converting from LIT to MOBI and I'd like to be able to override some of the CSS so that the paragraph styling happens on the actual book content and not all the up-front stuff. A few minor cosmetic changes and such.

Short of installing ABC Lit Converter or something, is there some way I can either have Calibre convert to HTML which I can then edit, or if not, at least leave the HTML files behind so that I can edit them by hand and then do the conversion from those? The 2nd option assuming that calibre can do a conversion from html to mobi/prc.

Thanks.

[itimpi]

I do not know about the mobi format, but the epub format is just a zipped set of HTML files. Renaming an epub file to have a .zip extension allows you open it in standard archivers such as winRAR and WinZip.

[CheriePie]

Originally Posted by itimpi

I do not know about the mobi format, but the epub format is just a zipped set of HTML files. Renaming an epub file to have a .zip extension allows you open it in standard archivers such as winRAR and WinZip.

Oh, that's cool to know!

Unfortunately, the files I'm starting off from are LIT, and that little trick, which I tried on them anyway, didn't work. Oh well...

[kovidgoyal]

lit2oeb filename.lit

[CheriePie]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

lit2oeb filename.lit

Ah hah! I did go looking for a lit2html or something similarly named. I never heard of oeb so I probably just assumed it was some ebook format I hadn't heard of. Thanks kovid!