IMP GUI Converter/Editor

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by Westlyn

I find that any .IMP more than about 100k takes an ever increasing time eg 400Kb takes about 20 minutes but 1500K takes about 4 hours and a 2500Kb IMP hadn't produced html after 7 or 8 hours, so there seems to be an exponential-like increase in processing time as the file size increases.

IMP_DUMP seems to be much less size affected with the same 1500Kb file taking less than 30 seconds to output the txt file.

IMP_DUMP just decompresses the text that was compressed as part of the .imp build process. It basically is a decompressor written in C and is extremely fast since it does no "processing" on THAT text.

I too do find the writing of this html file extremely slow, but it is a more complex process than just decompressing the text. It has to search/look-up the 'styles' used for each span of text and insert proper paragraph / new page breaks. There's even "special codes" spots that deal with images/tables/etc...

Perhaps Michael can review same for better efficiencies and try to curb the exponential growth in time when compared to file size.

The file that takes 4 hours also generates a .html file where the text is unreadable but the imp_dump .txt file is readable

eg Output html in browser from ConvertIMPGUI:

Ä ™ P) M a o “ % 
…s C i’ +' · 

è’ 7 < F q F k •s ™¹, s Ã�™ ™ K ˆ 

7t 7 �™ ™ K r ¡ Ø sf a�™ ]4c q ‘{ �£ ±c’ F\2 Ø { ^ cv � Û K

but the imp_dump output is readable; but is output with unix not windows line end termination. My highlighting of the line end chars.

"LF"PROLOGUE "LF"	"LF"I have a story to tell you. It has many beginnings, and perhaps one ending. Perhaps not. Beginnings and endings are contingent things anyway; inventions, devices. Where does any story really begin? There is always context, always an encompassingly greater epic, always something before the described events, unless we are to start every story with, 'BANG! Expand! Sssss . . .', then itemise the whole subsequent history of the universe before settling down, at last, to the particular tale in question. Similarly, no ending is final, unless it is the end of all things . . . "LF"Nevertheless

I must be being dense today but I couldn't see how to attach a file to a private email in this forum. So bear with me until I find out how.

You can't, so stop looking... Best to send Michael a private message asking him for his email or better still provide him with your off-site email and then you can make a "connection" for further email attachments...

I'll send you a zip file with the .imp, the .html and .txt output from ConvertIMPGUI and IPM_dump. Hopefully that would make it easier to track down the issue. I'm assuming the massive performance hit is maybe related to the output formatting issue.

Thanks again for being willing to take a look

I'm interest in this too!

[mscott161]

Is it possible that the IMP file is also encrypted? The convertIMP does not handle encrypted IMP files and would probably have a tough time with it. I can add the code to it if I had one of your IMP books to test with.
Michael

[Westlyn]

Attachment 57817

Originally Posted by mscott161

Is it possible that the IMP file is also encrypted? The convertIMP does not handle encrypted IMP files and would probably have a tough time with it. I can add the code to it if I had one of your IMP books to test with.
Michael

I'm pretty sure that the IMP is not encrypted, not least of which is that I don't think DeIMP can handle encrypted files and in any case I'm not providing any key when deimping.

Attached an encrypted zipfile with relevant files inside. Password sent via private mail.

[mscott161]

Westlyn,

I found the problem. The book is uncompressed. I have fixed the code and updated the attachments and the download link in the first post of this thread.

Michael

[Susant1]

Originally Posted by mscott161

Westlyn,

I found the problem. The book is uncompressed. I have fixed the code and updated the attachments and the download link in the first post of this thread.

Michael

I'm new here and have read the thread from the beginning. I have installed the executable as suggested by nrapallo in 11-26-2009. But when I try to open it, I get a box, "Application failed to initialize properly (OxcOOO135)" I'm running WinXP, SP2. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. TIA Susan

[Hat8ee]

Thanks so much for all your work.

[GrannyGrump]

I am throwing this question out into cyberspace, with little hope, as it looks like the IMP format has been mostly abandoned.

A few titles in the library that I want are only in IMP format. So I tried this converter, but with mixed results.

I "installed" IMP GUI Converter v 1.36 as instructed --- mscott161 stated that all that is required is the ConvertIMPGUI executable and the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib DLL. I launched the GUI and loaded a book into it. I CAN get the text extraction, but the HTML tool on the menu is grayed out / disabled.

The text extraction pulled out the text well enough, but apparently cannot deal with unicode characters. Lots of question marks/null glyphs for curly quotes, mdashes, diacritics, etc. I don't know if the HTML extraction would have better results, because it is disabled and not usable.

Any suggestions how to get the HTML extraction working?

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by grannyGrumpy

I am throwing this question out into cyberspace, with little hope, as it looks like the IMP format has been mostly abandoned.

I rarely use the .imp format anymore, but still am willing to dabble with it....

A few titles in the library that I want are only in IMP format. So I tried this converter, but with mixed results.

Which ones in particular? Early on, there were two distinct ways to produce .imp files, one using compressed text (the norm) and one using just images for each page (this doesn't have anything to extract/convert).

Perhaps, I can have a go at converting it, if you give me a link to the ebook...

I "installed" IMP GUI Converter v 1.36 as instructed --- mscott161 stated that all that is required is the ConvertIMPGUI executable and the ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib DLL. I launched the GUI and loaded a book into it. I CAN get the text extraction, but the HTML tool on the menu is grayed out / disabled.

Best to leave the .exe and associated files in that Debug directory under the bin folder; otherwise, you may encounter problems like you are noticing.

The text extraction pulled out the text well enough, but apparently cannot deal with unicode characters. Lots of question marks/null glyphs for curly quotes, mdashes, diacritics, etc. I don't know if the HTML extraction would have better results, because it is disabled and not usable.

My imp_dump tool just extracts the raw text as well. If you are adventurous, try using the cpan EBbook-Tools imp extraction as discussed in this thread.

Any suggestions how to get the HTML extraction working?

I don't think HTML extraction was working 100% to begin with. We never got that far...

[GrannyGrump]

Hi nrapallo, so glad to get your reply!
Sorry to be so late coming back.

Just as background, all I did was download the zip file for the IMP GUI Converter, and extracted that entire folder to my drive, then drilled down to the Debug / bin folder and launched the executable. It runs, I just don't know if I need to do anything else to get the html extraction to work.

One of the files I was trying was Zelda Pinwheel's "Jumping Frog" by Mark Twain, because I am doing that book in ePub, and wanted to see if she had restored the diacritics (I don't speak French). This is the link .

I tried a couple of other IMP files as well, but can't remember titles just now.

I also googled unsuccessfully for a reader app that will display IMP files on my computer.

All I want to do is extract a reasonably clean text or html file that I can convert to ePub. Did I misunderstand what this tool does?

I will give a try to the other extraction tool you linked to, and see how that goes.

Thanks for the advice!

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by grannyGrumpy

Hi nrapallo, so glad to get your reply!
Sorry to be so late coming back.

No worries...

Just as background, all I did was download the zip file for the IMP GUI Converter, and extracted that entire folder to my drive, then drilled down to the Debug / bin folder and launched the executable. It runs, I just don't know if I need to do anything else to get the html extraction to work.

Using WinXP, when I download the latest ConvertIMPGUI.zip I can produce the .txt, .html and even the .lrf conversions. I attach same below for your perusal.

One of the files I was trying was Zelda Pinwheel's "Jumping Frog" by Mark Twain, because I am doing that book in ePub, and wanted to see if she had restored the diacritics (I don't speak French). This is the link .

Ouch, diacritics support IS very limited or even non-existent!!!

I tried a couple of other IMP files as well, but can't remember titles just now.

I also googled unsuccessfully for a reader app that will display IMP files on my computer.

You can get an imp_viewer for your PC when you install the eBook-Publisher software available from here. It even allows you to print the .imp to a printer or to .pdf file using a PDF printer driver like PrimoPDF (it's free).

All I want to do is extract a reasonably clean text or html file that I can convert to ePub. Did I misunderstand what this tool does?

The steps I take are usually click the tabs in order i.e. General, Book Properties, and then Text Content. Once there, I click the Save Text button first, then the Save Html button. The latter launches a browser to display the results, but saves the .html anyway.

I will give a try to the other extraction tool you linked to, and see how that goes.

I used the Ebook-Tools v0.4.6 to convert the .imp to .html and the results were quite acceptable. I did notice that the diacritics didn't translate well and discovered that the .imp stores them in "MacRoman" OS font encoding!!!! I knew the original SoftBook (like my REB1200) used the Mac OS as its base for the GUI and now I know it also used it for the text encoding! That was news to me!!! [BTW, I used 'iconv' to convert from macroman text to ascii text.]

Anyway, I attach the various conversions using ConvertIMPGUI, Ebook-Tools, imp_dump and PrimoPDF/imp_viewer!

Thanks for the advice!

No problem, this was a worthwhile exercise for me.

Oh, and the .html source (now attached as "frog-html.zip" below) used for Zelda's .imp version has been already converted to .epub and .pdf at Feedbooks.com here! Just use these instead of converting....

Enjoy!

[GrannyGrump]

I am SO sorry for the belated response, I didn't see a notification of another reply.

Thank you so much for doing these conversions, and maybe you gave me a boost by the file name with v 1.3.6 A. I will be trying this out again with that version, and keeping my fingers crossed.

And thank you for the FeedBooks link. I had downloaded books from there quite some time ago, and they all seemed to be in plain-text, a la Gutenberg. Who knew they have nicely formatted books... (would be nice if they gave a hint how the book looks)

Thank you for the time and trouble, Santa better be generous with you for your good deeds.

[svru]

Hello mscott161,

your greatful tool "Convert IMP" doesn't work with german umlauts! That's very sad for my german eBooks. I am a German - sorry for my bad english possibly.

Would it be possible to make this possible?
I find no way around german IMP files to use in Calibre.



Calibre represents instead the German umlauts are any special characters.


Sven

[Animyos Fox]

Originally Posted by svru

Hello mscott161,

your greatful tool "Convert IMP" doesn't work with german umlauts! That's very sad for my german eBooks. I am a German - sorry for my bad english possibly.

Would it be possible to make this possible?
I find no way around german IMP files to use in Calibre.



Calibre represents instead the German umlauts are any special characters.


Sven

Originally Posted by GrannyGrump

The text extraction pulled out the text well enough, but apparently cannot deal with unicode characters. Lots of question marks/null glyphs for curly quotes, mdashes, diacritics, etc. I don't know if the HTML extraction would have better results, because it is disabled and not usable.

I have myself tried to convert an .imp ebook with both umlauts and accented vowels into an .lrc one using IMP, and run into the same problem. However, I found a way to (relatively) easily fix this:

I first converted the .lrc to .epub using Calibre (as my end goal was to have the ebook in .epub format). The file contained the special characters the others mentioned. Through comparing it with the original .imp file I had opened in the preview window of eBook Publisher, I could match the special characters with the original umlauts / accented vowels:



I can then copy the respective sequence of characters representing, for example, the “ü” and paste it into the Search > Search/Replace menu (1); set replace to the original character (in this case “ü”; 2); set the range to all text files (3); and replace all (4):



After having done that, you can immediately see that only the sequences of characters representing “ü”s have been replaced:



When you have replaced most of the erroneous special characters, the remaining ones can get quite sparse, so to say . To find the remaining ones, simply search for Â(without replacing anything, just search), as all of the sequences (at least in my case) contained this character as the common denominator, while the second one varies.

I hope my method can be helpful to you (in case it’s even needed anymore, as this thread is quite old …).