|
Hi,
I think you may be a bit confused about the Kindle file formats. They are not simply "packed" and unpacked" like a "zip" archive might be. They are "compiled" by kindlegen.
That means:
- text is split into records and stored in a mobi database file
- all links to text are translated to file positions in the text, if multiple text files are input, the text file names are now gone after this process
- all links to images, movies, etc are translated to specific records and the original file names are gone
- all tocs and spine info is translated to indexes into the records
- all opf information is modified to be stored in the mobi header as appropriate
- etc.
So there is no such thing as not making changes, the entire compilation (whether mobi or kf8) makes lots of changes.
That said, KindleUnpack is the only standalone program (it is a python program) that can actually "unpack" both older mobi and newer "kf8" style files into their component parts and will attempt to recreate as much of the original structure as possible but this must entail creating file names for graphic files and adding anchors for link destinations, rebuilding the toc, and etc since all of this is lost in the "compile" process.
If you enable the "raw" switch with KindleUnpack it will dump the actual raw file that is stored in the records of the mobi/kf8 file. You can see all of the changes made to them.
The goal of KindleUnpack is to reverse the compilation process as best we can, allow you to make whatever changes you want, and then pass that modified file back into Kindlegen to be re-compiled.
For older mobi files this means generating an html 3 based html file, some opf, and images files
For KF8, this means unpacking and recreating the full opf, image files, inlining svg, rebuilding css, toc, etc into something that looks like an epub.
Your best bet, might be to stick to an epub input file, compile with Kindlegen, try it with various viewers, then fix or modify your input epub as needed. If you don't have the input epub, then unpacking it using KindleUnpack is the only way forward.
Hope this helps,
KevinH
|