BookDesigner Bugs and Requests

[Gudy]

I hope that this is the right place, since most of the BD discussion seems to be on the Sony forums (why? hysterical raisins?) but this has nothing to do with the Sony or LRF.

Anyway, BD is an immensely useful tool, but I've got two bugs for BD 5, update from 2007-07-20:

The more important of those two, at least to me, is a bug in the FB2 export: the ampersand character (&) does not get correctly exported. Instead of "& a m p ;" it produces "<space> a m p ;". In cases where there is a space in front of the ampersand, there is only one space in the output, which makes this impossible to correct afterwards with a simple Search And Replace.

Also, the LIT import could stand some improvement, as it doesn't always convert the complete contents. An example where you can see that is Diane Duane's A Wind from the South freely available here: There are images at the start of each of the three parts of the novel, but only the first of those gets imported. (ConvertLit captures all of the images, but produces HTML that isn't exactly easy to work with.)

My first request also concerns the FB2 export. Would it be possible to add an option for converting/exporting Unicode characters and things like the ampersand as numeric entities instead of named entities, e.g. "& # 3 8 ;" instead of "& a m p ;"? This would help tremendously in preparing files for the Hanlin/lBook/Apolo V3.

My second request would be support for creating books in the new ePub format.

Finally, a question: What's the difference between BookDesigner and FictionBookDesigner, apart from the obvious ones (BD is more up to date - and has a better LIT import - and supports more output formats)?

[HarryT]

Your best bet is to PM your suggestions to the BD developer, "vvv". He calls in here occasionally.

[Gudy]

Thanks for the heads up. I just PM'd him.