Two format (text) questions

Snauzoo · 07-06-2011, 06:41 PM

One, I have a book that had a black bar in the text that replaced every apostrophe and quote marks. Not sure if the original had a single quote mark like 'this' instead of "this" - when I looked at this book in ADE, the black marks appeared as ? marks. Question marks, that is. I cannot see a way to fix this since if I do a search/replace it will remove the ? marks from real questions. I used smarten punctuation in my conversion to no avail.

ETA: I have located an uncoverted .zip form of this particular book, and am willing to give it a whirl to figure this out. It turns out it is not just apostrophes that have gone bad, but a lot of what is called soft hyphens.

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Two, this is an ipad question. When I have a book with two authors in Calibre, such as Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, they are entered in the author field as Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child. When I add these to iTunes, the ampersand gets changed to &amp or something equally wierd. How can I fix this ? I have ten books by them, plus a bunch of cookbooks with multiple authors and I have had to edit each individually.

Thanks in advance. My library project is coming along well. Just added about 40 books to the NOOK! And many more to the iPad.

dwig · 07-06-2011, 09:11 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snauzoo

...when I looked at this book in ADE, the black marks appeared as ? marks...

This happens when there is confusion about the font encoding during format conversion. It often happens when text files are converted to ebooks and the conversion software doesn't recognize the font encoding correctly (and guesses wrong) or needs to have the encoding set manually and the user fails to do so or do it correctly. Most ebook reading software displays a question mark or a special glyph (e.g. question mark in a box, ...) when it encounters a character it doesn't understand. The vertical bar is apparently what the software you are using on your iPad uses in such cases.

When you try to convert the contents of your ZIP file pay attention to the encoding setting in the conversion dialogs. Many encoding schemes are referred to as "code pages" and are often listed as "cp1252" or other numbers.

If you don't know the source encoding its a matter of trial-and-terror. Try conversions with different encoding settings until to hit on the correct one.

DoctorOhh · 07-07-2011, 12:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by dwig

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snauzoo

ETA: I have located an uncoverted .zip form of this particular book, and am willing to give it a whirl to figure this out. It turns out it is not just apostrophes that have gone bad, but a lot of what is called soft hyphens.

When you try to convert the contents of your ZIP file pay attention to the encoding setting in the conversion dialogs. Many encoding schemes are referred to as "code pages" and are often listed as "cp1252" or other numbers.

Zip is not a book format so it is hard to give advice. If this zip file is html then the encoding has to be entered in the HTML to Zip file type plugin prior to the book being added to calibre. Read #2 in this section of the manual. If it isn't html then follow #1 in that section per dwig's suggestion.

Snauzoo · 07-07-2011, 12:44 AM

Okay. I tried every single option for encoding that was listed. After each attempt I removed the book, and added back the html book. I can open the file with notepad and it appears perfectly normal. I can also see it just fine with Sigil but Sigil does state that it has an ability to render text that ADE cannot. Some of the encodings actually made it worse. Either I got a series of BBBB for each indent, or a series of boxes. And one of those preceeded every hyphen or apostrophe.

DoctorOhh · 07-07-2011, 12:51 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snauzoo

Okay. I tried every single option for encoding that was listed. After each attempt I removed the book, and added back the html book.

Did you change the encoding in the htmltozip plugin prior to adding the book back each time?

Snauzoo · 07-07-2011, 12:58 AM

Actually Walt I posted my reply to dwig before I saw yours. So what I did was per his suggestion, not yours.

Now, looking at my html document, there is no encoding in the doctype - my understanding is that for dtd xhtml 1.1 that an encoding must be stated unless it is utf 8 or 16. So I have absolutely no idea what the encoding is. And trying over and over for a dozen of them seems to be a crazy wild goose chase.

On a whim, since it is html, I popped it open in Firefox, and the browser chose iso 8859-1 (its on autodectect since I work with a lot of utf8 and cjk stuff at work) and I played around with it in Firefox - the windows encoding also displays it correctly. So I am going to try that one next. I tried using iso 8859 -1 in the plug in and it did not work. I did manage to crash Calibre good. Then the light went on! Firefox calls cp 1252 "Western Windows 1252" So I thought, well maybe someone used Word to create this document, and tried that and voil'a it worked.

Thanks for the help I never would have figured that out on my own.

DoctorOhh · 07-07-2011, 01:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Snauzoo

Now, looking at my html document, there is no encoding in the doctype - my understanding is that for dtd xhtml 1.1 that an encoding must be stated unless it is utf 8 or 16. So I have absolutely no idea what the encoding is. And trying over and over for a dozen of them seems to be a crazy wild goose chase.

Starson17 suggests the following guesses in this thread.

Quote:

Most people don't do it that way, however. They just try reasonable options until one seems to work. Here are the ones I usually try:
cp1252
cp1251
latin1
utf-8

07-07-2011, 12:58 AM	#6
Snauzoo Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 282 Join Date: May 2010 Device: iPad	Actually Walt I posted my reply to dwig before I saw yours. So what I did was per his suggestion, not yours. Now, looking at my html document, there is no encoding in the doctype - my understanding is that for dtd xhtml 1.1 that an encoding must be stated unless it is utf 8 or 16. So I have absolutely no idea what the encoding is. And trying over and over for a dozen of them seems to be a crazy wild goose chase. On a whim, since it is html, I popped it open in Firefox, and the browser chose iso 8859-1 (its on autodectect since I work with a lot of utf8 and cjk stuff at work) and I played around with it in Firefox - the windows encoding also displays it correctly. So I am going to try that one next. I tried using iso 8859 -1 in the plug in and it did not work. I did manage to crash Calibre good. Then the light went on! Firefox calls cp 1252 "Western Windows 1252" So I thought, well maybe someone used Word to create this document, and tried that and voil'a it worked. Thanks for the help I never would have figured that out on my own. Last edited by Snauzoo; 07-07-2011 at 01:15 AM.

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07-06-2011, 06:41 PM	#1
Snauzoo Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 282 Join Date: May 2010 Device: iPad	Two format (text) questions One, I have a book that had a black bar in the text that replaced every apostrophe and quote marks. Not sure if the original had a single quote mark like 'this' instead of "this" - when I looked at this book in ADE, the black marks appeared as ? marks. Question marks, that is. I cannot see a way to fix this since if I do a search/replace it will remove the ? marks from real questions. I used smarten punctuation in my conversion to no avail. ETA: I have located an uncoverted .zip form of this particular book, and am willing to give it a whirl to figure this out. It turns out it is not just apostrophes that have gone bad, but a lot of what is called soft hyphens. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Two, this is an ipad question. When I have a book with two authors in Calibre, such as Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child, they are entered in the author field as Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child. When I add these to iTunes, the ampersand gets changed to &amp or something equally wierd. How can I fix this ? I have ten books by them, plus a bunch of cookbooks with multiple authors and I have had to edit each individually. Thanks in advance. My library project is coming along well. Just added about 40 books to the NOOK! And many more to the iPad. Last edited by Snauzoo; 07-06-2011 at 07:43 PM.

07-07-2011, 12:44 AM	#4
Snauzoo Enthusiast Posts: 31 Karma: 282 Join Date: May 2010 Device: iPad	Okay. I tried every single option for encoding that was listed. After each attempt I removed the book, and added back the html book. I can open the file with notepad and it appears perfectly normal. I can also see it just fine with Sigil but Sigil does state that it has an ability to render text that ADE cannot. Some of the encodings actually made it worse. Either I got a series of BBBB for each indent, or a series of boxes. And one of those preceeded every hyphen or apostrophe.