PRS-500 Create LRS and LRF files from Python with pylrs

[kovidgoyal]

At the moment it looks like I'm going to fork pylrs as I need to make too many changes for html2lrf. Nonetheless, the patches are easily viewable via the source code browser on my website, so if Falstaff wants to backport some of them he is welcome to do so.

[athlonkmf]

ok, might be stupid, but I'm not familiar with python or phython programs although I do have a linux server with python. So... how do you use this tool?

[EatingPie]

Python is an interpreted language, similar to Perl in that respect. Or you can think of it as a super duper shell script.

If you have a program called "hellworld.py" you can run it like so:

python helloworld.py

And that's that.

In terms of pylrs, it's a library for converting e-books. It's not a final product, so pylrs itself will not convert books for you. You'd need to write a program that utilizes the pylrs library.

The pylrs library itself comes with some usage examples, so if you want to write a whole program, that's where to start. From a programmer's perspective, it's pretty straight-forward. But if you're not a programmer, this isn't what you're looking for.

And I get the impression that you are, indeed, looking for a finished product for conversion. I am aware of two which utilize pylrs for conversion, and they are fully finished products.

pielrf - A text to LRF (Sony EBook Format) converter. It mimics the look of books you download from the Sony Connect Store, and it's really easy to add chapters, headers, and Tables of Contents. Give you one guess why I know about this one!

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10752

libprs500 - Don't let the name deceive you, it's not ONLY a library -- it has competed programs to do conversion for you as well, plus a number of other features, like transferring LRFs to the Reader via USB. Here's the link to the html2lrf (part of libprs500) discussion:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10582

If you want a finished product, those are the way to go.

-Pie

[swr2408018]

When I specify a blockstyle attribute in a TextBlock(), it doesn't appear to have any effect. (I can work around this by creating a new blockstyle with the change.)

It doesn't look like the code does anything with those "overriding" values. E.g.:

self.textSettings = {}
self.blockSettings = {}
for name, value in settings.items():
if name in TextStyle.validSettings:
self.textSettings[name] = value
elif name in BlockStyle.validSettings:
self.blockSettings[name] = value
else:
raise LrsError, "%s not a valid setting for TextBlock" % name

captures the override values in either self.textSettings or self.blockSettings as appropriate, and then

self.textStyle = textStyle
self.blockStyle = blockStyle

# create a textStyle with our current text settings (for Span to find)
self.currentTextStyle = textStyle.copy()
self.currentTextStyle.attrs.update(self.textSettin gs)

copies overriding textStyle values into the currentTextStyle, but there is nothing similar for the overriding blockStyle values.

Am I missing something here?

Thanks!

Steve

[swr2408018]

If you want to reproduce "SmallCaps" support, e.g., SMALLCAPS, here's a class you can add to a project.

I threw this together with pretty limited understanding of python, but it's working well for me in an ebook of a Schiller play where all the names of the parts are in smallcaps. Let me know if I've done anything crazy here?

Thanks!

Steve

class SmallCap(Span):

tagname = "SmallCap"
def __init__(self, text=None):

Span.__init__(self,"")
SmallCap.append(self,text)

def append(self,content):

for i in range(len(content)+1):

if content[i-1:i].islower():

Span.append(self,Span(content[i-1:i].upper(),fontsize=70))

else:

Span.append(self,Span(content[i-1:i],fontsize=100))

[kovidgoyal]

There's a much updated version of pylrs in the libprs500 svn that includes a lot of capabilities that the original doesn't have. You should use that.

EDIT: With regard to small caps I think that belongs in application code not pylrs, since it doesn't use any features of LRS at all. It is a neat idea though and I've added small caps to my custom Span class in html2lrf :-) THough with a more efficient implementation (w.r.t. the number of Span classes needed)

[swr2408018]

Digging a little more on my own, I verified that the LRS output does contain the overriding TextBlock attrs, so this is very unlikely to be a pylrs issue. I'll post again if I figure out anything more.

Steve

[swr2408018]

Thanks, I'd already picked up your changes for making Plot() work properly with imbedded images; I'll look at the rest of your updates.

Agreed that the SmallCap implementation is a hog. I was under the impression that pylrs was filtering out unnecessary tags, but I just realized (while looking through the LRS output to debug the TextBlock/BlockStyle issue on the other thread) that that optimization is still in the "experimental" stage and off by default. I'll have to tighten up my version, given that the ebook I'm working on has hundreds of SmallCap strings.

(And also agreed this is project or sample code, not pylrs code.)

Steve