junk charachters importing html to Calibre

[rexall]

Thu 23 May 2013, 6:05 pm

Hi All,

I scan a hard copy book to MS Word. Then save as "filtered html." Then import to Calibre. When I convert the zip file to ePub, quotation marks, apostrophes (possibly other characters) display as "wingdings" or some such strange font, specifically a black diamond with a question mark.

Any suggestions for a fix?

Thanks!

Rex in Thailand

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[kovidgoyal]

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/faq....r-smart-quotes

[jackie_w]

When saving from MSWord to Webpage filtered it should help if you make sure the output html always uses UTF-8 encoding. In my rather ancient (version 10) copy of MSWord that particular setting is found under Tools - Options - General - Web Options - Encoding - Save this document as - Unicode (UTF-8). But I'm afraid I don't know where Word has moved this option to in more recent versions.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

But I'm afraid I don't know where Word has moved this option to in more recent versions.

2007 is @ Word Options->Advanced->Web Options(scroll down to see it)->Encoding

@rexall - if you still have the problem and you have Word 2007/10/13 then try saving the file as a DOCX and using the DOCX_Input plug-in.

I've been using it for a couple of weeks. I can produce much cleaner output using DOCX_Input to convert DOCX to EPUB, than I was ever able to get by converting RTF or Filtered HTML to EPUB .

Consequently editing the EPUB in Sigil is now a viable proposition, primarily because I don't get any MS specific HTML in the EPUB.

Plus the docx files are up to 90% smaller than rtf's, and the conversions are about 30-40% faster. For what more could one ask, I ask .

The documents I convert are very vanilla, if a PDF has a complex layout, images, tables, infographics etc then I put up with the PDF. Which is less of a hardship since Moz put a FAQ PDF reader in Firefox.

You might want to adjust the plugin source code by hand to set the default option values to suit your needs as I did - see post #38 in the plug-in thread.

BR