[GUI Plugin] FanFicFare

[RuberFF]

I'm having some problems with fanficare on my Kindle, I was able to understand how to update stories and transfer the update from the PC to my kindle but now when I do it the whole book is messed up, some stories have practically no spacing between them and practically become a "wall of text" and all of them lose the ability to select the chapter from the "chap select" on top of the kindle, it just shows "Begin-pages and position-cover-summary-end" that's it, even the covers stops working when I update the stories.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by RuberFF

I'm having some problems with fanficare on my Kindle, I was able to understand how to update stories and transfer the update from the PC to my kindle but now when I do it the whole book is messed up, some stories have practically no spacing between them and practically become a "wall of text" and all of them lose the ability to select the chapter from the "chap select" on top of the kindle, it just shows "Begin-pages and position-cover-summary-end" that's it, even the covers stops working when I update the stories.

Are you saving it as MOBI?

FanFicFare and eReaders

FanFicFare's inbuilt MOBI support is legacy code (predating JimmXinu's involvement with the project) and is generally not recommended for use as it has missing chapter markers, missing images, and occasionally poor HTML that breaks indexing. Note that support for the format is also deprecated for 'Send to Kindle' — AZW3 or ePub are recommended instead.

If you still wish to have a MOBI version, it is best to download as another format such as ePub and use calibre's Convert function to change it. This post by Dylan Tomorrow also describes another solution that uses KindleGen.

For missing covers:

Kindle may remove the cover of sideloaded books when connecting to Amazon's servers. Connecting your device to Calibre will update the cover and fix this. (This will also update the cover if you change it in the Calibre library.)

[RuberFF]

Tried converting the file into EPUB but it didn't change anything

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by RuberFF

I'm having some problems with fanficare on my Kindle, I was able to understand how to update stories and transfer the update from the PC to my kindle but now when I do it the whole book is messed up, some stories have practically no spacing between them and practically become a "wall of text" and all of them lose the ability to select the chapter from the "chap select" on top of the kindle, it just shows "Begin-pages and position-cover-summary-end" that's it, even the covers stops working when I update the stories.

What format are you downloading to?

I recommend always downloading to epub, it has the best support and allows for updates, and then converting to azw3 for Kindle use.

Can you provide a few story URLs (SFW please) that exhibit the issue? And/or post the bad ebook format (again SFW please)?

Many problems end up being site/author/story specific.

Converting an existing mobi that's bad to a different format isn't going to help, you'd need to download again to epub instead.

[ownedbycats]

Originally Posted by RuberFF

Tried converting the file into EPUB but it didn't change anything

Yes, because you're just converting the already-broken MOBI into a broken ePub. Re-download it as ePub instead.

[RuberFF]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

What format are you downloading to?

I recommend always downloading to epub, it has the best support and allows for updates, and then converting to azw3 for Kindle use.

Can you provide a few story URLs (SFW please) that exhibit the issue? And/or post the bad ebook format (again SFW please)?

Many problems end up being site/author/story specific.

Converting an existing mobi that's bad to a different format isn't going to help, you'd need to download again to epub instead.

I think I used to download the file in Epub format but then upload it in Mobi format to the Kindle, it didn't give any problem at the beginning but when I uploaded a Fanfiction the whole file got messed up, I followed ownedbycats tip and redownloaded the whole fanfic, it looks like it worked now

[RuberFF]

Tough, is there a way to keep saved my login info for questionablequesting NSFW section? I tried using the "edit personal.ini" but I can't get it to work

[JimmXinu]

Yes, you need something like:

[forum.questionablequesting.com]
username:YourUser
password:YourPass
always_login:true

[Reader1337]

I have a pair of issues with downloading from DeviantArt.

The first is that that downloading stories only works if there are no comments in the comment section of the story being downloaded. If there are comments, the comments gets captured instead of the story.

The second is that when selecting the option to get story URLs from the webpage only a maximum of ten URLs are scraped from the galleries, even if there are more than ten items in the gallery.

I am currently running FanFicFare v4.32.3 on Calibre Portable v7.6

[bigwoof]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

New (Point) Version Released

Version 4.32.3 - 2024-03-04
- Report errors during library update loop better.

is there a way to turn this off?

right now, if there is *any* error, at the end of the update, a modal box is raised and that stops *everything* in calibre from running (as far as I can tell) until you realise that box is there and go ok it. that is not great when you have multiple tasks running.

when updating fanfiction.net, errors are common (chrome decides not to cache things (grrrr), author updates multiple chapters at one go (see below), etc.)

I've noticed that it also treats "story already included" as an error <== happens when author updates multiple chapters at one go. not sure why this is an error.

I'm not sure what to do with the error as well. is knowing the line number where something got triggered useful for everyone? previously, I would just pull the story errors from the end of task log and that seemed fine.

Thanks!

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Reader1337

I have a pair of issues with downloading from DeviantArt.
...

Can you provide some URLs that exhibit the issues? SFW, please.

Originally Posted by bigwoof

is there a way to turn this off?
...

Grab the latest test version.

[Reader1337]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Can you provide some URLs that exhibit the issues? SFW, please.

Website ate my previous reply but here we go:

Story with comments:
https://www.deviantart.com/dearpoetr...etry-367984693

Story without comments (When I accessed it at least):
https://www.deviantart.com/illustrat...Win-1018949124

Get story URLs from webpage (Expected: ~73, Actual: 10):
https://www.deviantart.com/dearpoetr...943/old-poetry

[RuberFF]

Is there a way to stop Calibre from automatically converting files into MOBI when I send them to the kindle? I already put the default format to EPUB but some fanfictions still won't get updated even if I choose to update calibre metadata

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version Posted

2023-03-10
- adapter_deviantartcom: Add another way to remove comments section.

Originally Posted by Reader1337

Story with comments:
https://www.deviantart.com/dearpoetr...etry-367984693

Story without comments (When I accessed it at least):
https://www.deviantart.com/illustrat...Win-1018949124

deviantart has some complex HTML which varies a bit by story age.

I've added code that removes more variants of the comments section and it works with the stories I've tried, but I don't read deviantart, so that's a pretty small test set.

Originally Posted by Reader1337

Get story URLs from webpage (Expected: ~73, Actual: 10):
https://www.deviantart.com/dearpoetr...943/old-poetry

The 'Get story URLs from webpage' feature is deliberately very general and only knows how to read <a> tags out of HTML on that page.

The HTML the site gives FFF for that URL only contains 10 story URLs because it is dividing the full list into pages of 10 links each.

You may not be seeing the pages in your browser, depending on your cookies/settings for the site--I was seeing the full list as first in browser before clearing site cookies.

As a work around, you can select text in the browser page and copy/paste or drag/drop it into the 'Story URLs' box of FFF's 'Download from URLs' dialog and FFF will pick out the story URLs. FYI, there may be clipboard sizes applied that still prevent getting a whole page at once.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by RuberFF

Is there a way to stop Calibre from automatically converting files into MOBI when I send them to the kindle? I already put the default format to EPUB but some fanfictions still won't get updated even if I choose to update calibre metadata

Personally, I have Calibre set to convert to azw3 by default (Calibre Preferences > Behavior > Preferred output format) and use the FFF feature 'Automatically Convert new/updated books'.

If you already have a Kindle format like azw3, Calibre should send that instead of mobi.

And as I recall, you can configure what format Calibre will convert to automatically for a specific device, but I think you have to have the device plugged in at the time to change it?

Not sure what you mean saying "some fanfictions still won't get updated".

I will point out when FFF says 'calibre metadata', it means the library columns, not the ebook format files. So if you do 'Update Calibre Metadata from Web Site' that specifically means only update the Calibre columns and not to change the epub.