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Old 01-21-2011, 07:25 PM   #2
ATDrake
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Posts: 11,517
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Join Date: Mar 2010
Location: Roundworld
Device: Kindle 2 International, Sony PRS-T1, BlackBerry PlayBook, Acer Iconia
Quote:
Originally Posted by twedigteam View Post
What's the best way to tweak/fine-tune a .mobi file after conversion from epub?
If it was an ePub to begin with, start with your original ePub, make any modifications you want, and then convert to Mobi. That's what I do with all of mine (and I make a point of picking up the ePub versions just so that I can).

Trust me, it's by far easier to go back and tweak your modified ePub to output a new Mobi than it is to make any alterations beyond metadata to an existing Mobi, and far less frustrating as well. And it also saves time, not having to go through any intermediate re-conversion steps.

My personal workflow is:
  1. unzip ePub into working folder,
  2. text editor to tweak OPF and NCX to produce chapter markers and proper table of contents linkage, and if necessary modify css & tags for the sort of display I like (I'm lazy and not-too-picky about this, so as long as there are proper scenebreaks and no-indent on the first paragraph of a section and the chapters start on new pages, I'm reasonably content)
  3. run it through KindleGen and kindlestrip.py to get rid of the bloat,
  4. check new Mobi in KindlePreviewer to see if anything's gone horribly wrong with the XHTML+CSS to MobiHTML "translation" (happens fairly often for incredibly trivial reasons),
  5. Mobi2Mobi to fix the inevitable metadata errors that KindleGen produces,
  6. read on Kindle and highlight noticeable typos/formatting errors, etc.,
  7. text editor to fix errors in a copy of the previously-modified unzipped ePub files (just in case I manage to screw things up in a way that involves restarting from scratch),
  8. rinse and repeat steps 1-7 if necessary.

Hope this helps.

Last edited by ATDrake; 01-21-2011 at 07:30 PM. Reason: Ironically, typo and formatting fixing.
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