Quote:
Originally Posted by DrChiper
Is there actually a clean method to compare 2 epubs with each other to spot differences in text? Layout differences would be a nice-2-have too, but seems to me rather difficult to realize and of limited use (but I might be wrong, as I have demonstrated before  ) |
I use the free (and excellent) tool WinMerge. It will not compare your epubs as-is, but if you unpack them with winrar it will compare all folderse recursively. You could also convert both epubs to text with calibre, and compare those. Text files are a bit easier to work with. Both of these options can be automated and integrated with Explorer or Nautilus using a suitable shell script, this enables you to work with epubs outside of calibre by using the command line ebook-convert. I use this to check over corrections I've made in ebooks I've read, and it works fine. For best results, open and save the epub in Sigil before making a copy for editing.
None of these methods will work well if you try to compare epubs with significant differences, such as two different editions of the same book. A comparison of the Feedbook and Gutenberg versions of the same book will show *a lot* of differences, some because of different titlepages and layout, but also in the body text due to "irrelevant things" like differing dashes, quotation marks and so on.
Good luck, and if you find a brilliant solution to this problem, please post it here