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ewiplayer · 12-09-2008, 04:25 PM

I've been making a lot of EPUB files lately out of some rather technical CHM related files (I'm slowly replacing my pulp library so I can keep everything, including all my notes(!) in this wonderful device) and have found that it's quite difficult to get right.

Some rules of thumb I've come across:

Make sure all tags are complete (no dangling tags). htmltidy does a great job here
Get rid of as many tables as you can! A lot of these CHM type files put the entire content of the page in one table and that causes tons of problems
"normal" tables tend to get truncated in the reader due to being too wide. Convert these tables to some intelligent lists with <hr/>'s around them
Play with the CSS to get the colors cleaned up. A lot of the "color" gets translated to light grey and it sucks. Best just to change everything to black that you can
<pre> blocks of code can go off the page as well. Use the CSS to shrink their font size and, at worst, reformat the blocks to keep them into a 70 character width at 6pt.

And get yourself a good editor. These are extremely complex edits and they occur across a ton of files... VIM (http://www.vim.org) has always been my editor of choice and it makes these kinds of edits a breeze (relatively speaking - say about 5-10 minutes per book) but if you're not used to this kind of editor, it's going to be more trouble than it's worth.

12-09-2008, 04:25 PM	#12
ewiplayer Enthusiast Posts: 47 Karma: 90 Join Date: Nov 2008 Device: Sony PRS-700	I've been making a lot of EPUB files lately out of some rather technical CHM related files (I'm slowly replacing my pulp library so I can keep everything, including all my notes(!) in this wonderful device) and have found that it's quite difficult to get right. Some rules of thumb I've come across: Make sure all tags are complete (no dangling tags). htmltidy does a great job here Get rid of as many tables as you can! A lot of these CHM type files put the entire content of the page in one table and that causes tons of problems "normal" tables tend to get truncated in the reader due to being too wide. Convert these tables to some intelligent lists with <hr/>'s around them Play with the CSS to get the colors cleaned up. A lot of the "color" gets translated to light grey and it sucks. Best just to change everything to black that you can <pre> blocks of code can go off the page as well. Use the CSS to shrink their font size and, at worst, reformat the blocks to keep them into a 70 character width at 6pt. And get yourself a good editor. These are extremely complex edits and they occur across a ton of files... VIM (http://www.vim.org) has always been my editor of choice and it makes these kinds of edits a breeze (relatively speaking - say about 5-10 minutes per book) but if you're not used to this kind of editor, it's going to be more trouble than it's worth.