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bill_mchale · 10-13-2008, 10:39 AM

Thanks for trying Kovid. I guess part of me is just stubborn

. I like the technology of the Sony readers quite a lot.. if they were to only come up with a platform neutral solution, I would buy one tomorrow...

That being said, on the way to work this morning, I might have thought of a solution for the problem with the perl html2fb script. Basically it seems to have problems with the encoding of special characters (though in the defense of the script, firefox also had problems when I asked it to save the web page to a text file). Everytime it sees something like this: &#8220, the script seems to have some problems with it; instead of seeing a type of quotation mark, I get several nonsense characters in its place.

Unfortunately, the perl code the original author used, is rather cryptic and not very well commented. Also, I am not entirely sure the problem is with his library, it might be with the HTML::Treebuilder package he uses. Also, unfortunately, because of sparse web documentation, I am not 100% that fb2 properly supports the same character encoding that html does (Though I think it does). This leaves me with two possible approaches, both cluges, but both should solve the problem.

The first solution is to simply write a script to substitute all the special characters in the script for more generic ascii characters. A left and right quote might be nice, but they are not essential to keep a book readable.

The second solution is similar to the first, but it is to first substitute the current encoding with one that html2fb2 will leave alone. Once its been converted to fb2, a second script can restore the original encoding. This would be optimal... assuming fb2 actually understands the encoding (being that it is XML, I would think it should).

--
Bill

10-13-2008, 10:39 AM	#10
bill_mchale Wizard Posts: 1,451 Karma: 1550000 Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: Maryland, USA Device: Nook Simple Touch, HPC Evo 4G LTE	Thanks for trying Kovid. I guess part of me is just stubborn . I like the technology of the Sony readers quite a lot.. if they were to only come up with a platform neutral solution, I would buy one tomorrow... That being said, on the way to work this morning, I might have thought of a solution for the problem with the perl html2fb script. Basically it seems to have problems with the encoding of special characters (though in the defense of the script, firefox also had problems when I asked it to save the web page to a text file). Everytime it sees something like this: &#8220, the script seems to have some problems with it; instead of seeing a type of quotation mark, I get several nonsense characters in its place. Unfortunately, the perl code the original author used, is rather cryptic and not very well commented. Also, I am not entirely sure the problem is with his library, it might be with the HTML::Treebuilder package he uses. Also, unfortunately, because of sparse web documentation, I am not 100% that fb2 properly supports the same character encoding that html does (Though I think it does). This leaves me with two possible approaches, both cluges, but both should solve the problem. The first solution is to simply write a script to substitute all the special characters in the script for more generic ascii characters. A left and right quote might be nice, but they are not essential to keep a book readable. The second solution is similar to the first, but it is to first substitute the current encoding with one that html2fb2 will leave alone. Once its been converted to fb2, a second script can restore the original encoding. This would be optimal... assuming fb2 actually understands the encoding (being that it is XML, I would think it should). -- Bill Last edited by bill_mchale; 10-13-2008 at 10:42 AM.