Conversion of DOC to EPUB under Linux (Ubuntu 9.10), and a couple of other questions

[booksonthemove]

I have quite a few DOC books. Is there a neat CLI solution or do i have to load it into openoffice and save to RTF then convert to EPUB ?

I've also a load of CHM stuff, almost all of it technical manuals. I've seen a way to do this involving decompiling but it was from a while ago and also it involved using the hh utility which is not present under Linux. What is the best method to convert to something my PRS-600 can use? Would EPUB still be the best output format?

thanks

[booksonthemove]

The first bit has been answered here

[frabjous]

I would prefer HTML over RTF as your intermediary format, especially if going to ePub (which is just zipped HTML).

You can use OpenOffice to convert to HTML or RTF certainly. I think there's a way of making it do on the commandline, but I've never managed to get it to work. However, it's fairly easy with AbiWord (Ubuntu package abiword).

The following shell command will batch convert every .doc and .docx in a given folder to .epub (with AbiWord and calibe installed):

(Be careful of files ending in .html or .epub with the same names already in the same folder; I haven't bothered watching for them.)

for i in *.doc ; do abiword --to=html "$i" ; ebook-convert "${i%.doc}.html" "${i%.doc}.epub" --output-profile="sony" ; done

I don't know much about *.chm files, but if AbiWord can open them (likely), changing *.doc to *.chm in the above will do the trick.

[kovidgoyal]

CHM support is in the works.