MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Extracting text with ebook-convert: Confused about "pagebreak" option

wolpi · 02-14-2026, 02:29 PM

Hello,

I am trying to extract the text from various ebook formats to corresponding ".txt" files, and want to preserve page/chapter breaks (ideally with the "Formfeed" control character)

I found "ebook-convert"s "--chapter-mark" option with the "pagebreak" parameter, but am unable to figure out from the documentation how this is intended to work and if it might do what I am trying to achieve.

When I run the command like

Code:

ebook-convert "~/Book.epub" "~/Book.txt" --chapter-mark pagebreak

the command output shows the chapters detected in the Book.epub file, but in the generated Book.txt I can find nothing that can be interpreted as a pagebreak indicator.

This is running Calibre 9.2.1 on macOS 15

Thanks!

02-14-2026, 02:29 PM	#1
wolpi Junior Member Posts: 8 Karma: 10 Join Date: May 2015 Device: iPad2	Extracting text with ebook-convert: Confused about "pagebreak" option Hello, I am trying to extract the text from various ebook formats to corresponding ".txt" files, and want to preserve page/chapter breaks (ideally with the "Formfeed" control character) I found "ebook-convert"s "--chapter-mark" option with the "pagebreak" parameter, but am unable to figure out from the documentation how this is intended to work and if it might do what I am trying to achieve. When I run the command like Code: ebook-convert "~/Book.epub" "~/Book.txt" --chapter-mark pagebreak the command output shows the chapters detected in the Book.epub file, but in the generated Book.txt I can find nothing that can be interpreted as a pagebreak indicator. This is running Calibre 9.2.1 on macOS 15 Thanks!