[Conversion Plugin] KFX Input

[bustacap]

Originally Posted by mallomar

Hi, I'm having an issue where the pages of a fixed layout KFX are all jumbled. Thought something went wrong in the conversion despite using From KFX to Convert Selected Book to EPUB but I tried uploading the KFX in Calibre to my Kindle, in airplane mode and it has the same issues. This is the book. I can upload a scrambed EPUB of the converted file if it would help.

the sample looks broken already so its very likely just the book

[mallomar]

Originally Posted by bustacap

the sample looks broken already so its very likely just the book

Huh, that's bizarre. Even stranger is that the Kindle edition has two five star reviews. I opened it on Kindle PC and that it is indeed broken. I put in a complaint to Amazon.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by mallomar

Hi, I'm having an issue where the pages of a fixed layout KFX are all jumbled.

I took a look at the free sample of that book. It was formatted incorrectly by the publisher in a way that causes it to display poorly.

It is a typical children's book, pages are mostly images with some text. However instead of using the proper Kindle print replica format, the publisher used reflowable layout with each page having an associated background image. That renders poorly. In most cases the reader sees only part of each full page image.

[tomsem]

I have discovered a couple of minor issues using From KFX to ePub when the source is print replica:

1) there is no <meta name="cover" ... > tag so ePub reading systems seem not to generate a cover thumbnail to display in the book listing.

2) I do not know what implications are for ePub reading systems, but if you open the ePub in Kindle Previewer, it doesn't stretch the page image to fill display. ePubs generated from other KFX fixed-layout formats (comic book/manga/childrens, and whatever we might call KFX that contains positioned text, similar to FXL ePub) will stretch to fill.

I sometimes get PDF format for comics (e.g. Humble Bundle) and they often have searchable text in them.

For Kindle platform it sorta works okay to use Send to Kindle to convert to print replica (after fixing up metadata and maybe adding navigation/bookmarks). The text remains searchable and selectable, but one downside is there is no way to see 'spreads' as print replica only supports display of one page at a time.

I also like to have ePub format for everything, but calibre does not convert to FXL ePub, and while KCC maybe will, it will not preserve ToC, much less migrate text.

So I was trying to take the print replica which S2K created and use that as input for From KFX.

It turns out having FXL ePub with text is not the 'win' it should be. So far I have not found a reading system that will do text search or selection with this; Thorium will try to read it out but generally FXL does not have any reading order defined so it is kinda useless. S2K converts to KF8 fixed layout, which again doesn't support text search or selection.

So going forward I will probably just use Kindle Create to generate comic format KFX from the PDF, use that for side loading and conversion to ePub, and generate a PDF for Send To Kindle for reading with Kindle apps etc.

Ergo I won't have any use case for converting print replica KFX to anything but PDF (only way to get one is to create personal document from PDF with S2K, or from Kindle store and the still functioning Kindle for PC method). So fixing ePub conversion isn't something at least I need.