chasing the omnibus

[Notjohn]

Is there an easy way to merge several epubs into one, using Sigil? I have five short ebooks that I want to combine as a boxed set or omnibus.

I have an earlier version of the omnibus and, alas, I don't remember how I did that one. In updating the individual short books this month, I've made too many changes to replicate them in the larger book. Can I just open a new version of Book 1 and somehow insert Book 2 into it, followed by books 3, 4, and 5? It would then be a simple matter to redo the front- and back-matter and otherwise clean up the book.

Thanks, and happy Christmas! - NJ

[Tex2002ans]

In Calibre, I use the EPUBMerge plugin.

5 books? You can put them in whatever order you want, then it would import all the HTML + CSS for you.

In Sigil, you could always Add Existing Files, but you'd have to make sure all your filenames are unique.

If books are multi-volume works, I typically name my files like this:

• Book01.-.Chapter.01.xhtml
• Book01.-.Chapter.02.xhtml
• ...
• Book99.-.Chapter.01.xhtml

This would guarantee, when merging multiple books together, that there won't be any conflicts.

- - -

Side Note: You'll have to make sure all your CSS is correct+consistent though. If you weren't careful (or didn't use the same CSS across all your books), you may have a mess on your hands.

(For more info, see my posts discussing technical details, pitfalls/tips/tricks when merging 26 "books" together to clean up.)

[theducks]

+1 for EPUB Merge.
Why work hard?
Use it to merge, touch up with Sigil (or Calibre)

[Notjohn]

Right! I will go in search of the plug-in....

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Right! I will go in search of the plug-in....

It is on the Get Plugins list:

[KevinH]

What I typically do in Sigil is as follows:
1. open each epub in Sigil and use the ReRenamer tool to prefix file names in one go to add something like Book1, etc and save it.
2. Open Book1, and then use Add Existing ... to add the html files in Book2 (it will pull in linked images and stylesheets automatically)
3. Repeat for remaining books.
4. Use BookBrowser's move capability to organize files into whatever folders you want
5. Recreate ToC


If this is an epub 3, remember to pull any existing javascripts by hand. And do not forget to use the Update Manifest Properties tool.


Using an EpubMerge plugin is probably easier ... I will look into creating and adding a Sigil plugin to do that in the future!

[Notjohn]

Brilliant, thanks. I am well launched. -- NJ

[BetterRed]

EpubMerge can be used from the command line

BR

[Notjohn]

>If you weren't careful (or didn't use the same CSS across all your books), you may have a mess on your hands.

This proved to be the case, but it was all fixable, and I now have a validated file. Thank you all! -- NJ

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

>If you weren't careful (or didn't use the same CSS across all your books), you may have a mess on your hands.

This proved to be the case, but it was all fixable, and I now have a validated file. Thank you all! -- NJ

In the future you may be able to avoid differing CSS if you use a consistent CSS with combinators. For example, instead of having a paragraph class so it's not indented after a scene change, I use

hr + p {
  text-indent: 0;
}

Although I confess that when cleaning up books I've bought I find it easier when they do use a lot of classes.

[AlanHK]

Originally Posted by KevinH

What I typically do in Sigil is as follows:
1. open each epub in Sigil and use the ReRenamer tool to prefix file names in one go to add something like Book1, etc and save it.
2. Open Book1, and then use Add Existing ... to add the html files in Book2 (it will pull in linked images and stylesheets automatically)

Make sure to rename each CSS file to be unique: book1.css.
Unless you are sure you used identical css files for all books.
Also images.

You can leave it at that, each file or set of files will have its own CSS, I see a lot of commercial omnibi do that.
I try to unify them.

First make a new CSS file and link it to all html files.
Open one of the other CSS files and copy in the base styles: body, p, headings, to the new file.
Do a "Delete unused classes" to begin.
Open a file in book1.
Look at a body text para. Click to go to its CSS defn.
if it's reasonable, cut (not just copy) that from the CSS and paste it in your new stylesheet.
Now open a file in book2.
Look at its body text para. If different to that in book 1, select all the book2 files, S&R
"bodytext2" to "bodytext1" -- including the quotemarks.
"Delete unused classes" should remove Bodytext2 definition.

Need to take more care if you get a set of files with calibreNN stylenames that have different definitions in each book.
Only use S&R on "Selected files" in that case.

After each new style added to your master file, delete unused styles until the other files are all empty, then delete the files and the links to them.

Tedious at times, but then you can restyle the book and keep it consistent.
For title pages, can be faster to just copy one of them and paste the title text into it rather than mess with styles.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

What I typically do in Sigil is as follows:
1. open each epub in Sigil and use the ReRenamer tool to prefix file names in one go to add something like Book1, etc and save it.
2. Open Book1, and then use Add Existing ... to add the html files in Book2 (it will pull in linked images and stylesheets automatically)
3. Repeat for remaining books.
4. Use BookBrowser's move capability to organize files into whatever folders you want
5. Recreate ToC
...

Just want to make sure I'm understanding correctly.

In Step 2, do I need to do Folder Out on Book2 to make the html files accessible for Add Existing? Or can Add Existing actually pull html files out of an .epub, and if so, how do I do this? (When open Book1 and use Add Existing to select Book2.epub, nothing happens. So I'm figuring I need to do Folder Out on Book2 first ... yes?)

Thank you!

[KevinH]

I just use Save As after ReRenaming the files and then run unzip on the resultingepub. But FolderOut will work also.

[odamizu]

Thank you!