Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
Best idea I've heard all day. But will it do it with XHTML files? That's been the big hold up... everything wants HTML, not XHTML.
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So does Mobi, but I don't think it will matter. XHTML
is HTML. Mobi Creator accepts HTML, Word documents, plain text and PDF files as input. It rips the input to HTML, and generates a Mobi book from that. (A Mobipocket book is essentially encapsulated HTML.)
Mobi accepts *.HTM, *.HTML, and *.XHTML files as HTML input. It accepts RTF files as well as Word documents, though you have to click the drop-down and select All Files to have an RTF file show in the input box.
It's a two step process, so you can stop at the rip to HTML stage and edit the generated HTML before doing a build of an actual Mobi book.
PDFs are problematic. Mobi will attempt to extract it to HTML, but how well it does depends on the PDF. Simple PDFs in one column with in-line illustrations convert well. More complex documents with fancy formatting or multiple columns are likely to be a mess. (I've used Mobi Creator to rip a few PDFs to HTML, and then converted the HTML file for Plucker on my Palm OS PDA instead of a Mobi book. I can make a much smaller Plucker file using gzip compatible compression, and Plucker performs better than Mobi reader on my PDA.)
One "gotcha" to be aware of: Mobi Creator has an assortment of fields to fill in, to specify things like the cover image you want to use and metadata you want to add for the book. You must explicitly save your changes after filling in each field. You can't change more than one and do a Save to save them all. If you navigate away from any input area without saving, the changes will be lost.
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Dennis