EPUB output

[Katdragon]

I'm having a little bit of trouble with my Kobo and Calibre too. Using Calibre I've converted from PDB and PDF files to EPUB but the font sizes are stuck at really small and nothing I can do will fix that (using the base font size didn't do anything). I think I'll try the KoboBulkFixer mentioned and hope that the firmware fix helps. I would like to see this capability in Calibre so that I can use one program to do everything

In addition, I downloaded the correct covers for the books when they'd been converted to EPUB (I downloaded the covers and converted them again) but they're while they're showing up on Calibre, they're not doing so on the Kobo.

[kovidgoyal]

You have to delete the files from the Kobo and then resend them for the updated covers to show up (The kobo caches covers and doesn't regenrate the cache).

[Katdragon]

Thanks kovidgoyal,
I'm pretty sure I tried that, but I'll do it again.
First I have to get that KoboBulkFixer working - it's giving me evil errors.

Edit: Woohoo! It's working - and my font sizes are nice and malleable.
Now to hide my Kobo from myself until I finish my uni assignments

[rty]

@Kovid,

This is related to Bug Ticket #5982 on Calibre generated chinese news EPUB. I am not sure how hard it is to fix, but I tested again and confirmed that the garbled Chinese display of the article description line on the Feed page ( UTF-8 encoded feed) can be fixed by simply removing the line "Font-Family: SANS" under ".articledescription" of the stylesheet.css.



Can you please take a look?

[kovidgoyal]

@rty: I have to get to the ticket, be patient

[bpa123]

Can someone help me? I am totally lost. I have a Cybook Opus and want to use ePub rather than Mobipocket format. But whenever I use Calibre to generate news or to convert books, the output has no margins at all. That means the edges of the text are in shadow. I have tried fixing this through Calibre but I am obviously doing something wrong because it won't change. I would like to have a couple of mm of margin all round. How do I do this? If someone does know, if they could explain it very simply - I am not a techie! Thank you in advance.

[Katdragon]

Hi everyone,
I converted a PDB file to EPUB using Calibre. As I do with all of my EPUB files, before I put them on my Kobo I pop them into Sigil to see if there are any problems.

I found that with this particular file, Calibre has inserted line breaks that take off the first letter of a word at the start of the paragraph and puts another line under it.

Here is the code:

<p class="calibre1"></p>

<div class="calibre10">
M
</div>

<p>y jailers merely tightened their hold and frog-marched me when I wobbled. Suckers are very strong; they may not have noticed that they were now bearing nearly all my weight as my knees gave and my feet lost their purchase on the ragged ground.</p>

Does anyone know how to fix this without having to go through every single paragraph of the story? I'd like to do it with a find/replace thing if possible (using Sigil??).

Your help would be very much appreciated as I want to get to read my book ASAP!

Thanks

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Katdragon

Hi everyone,
I converted a PDB file to EPUB using Calibre. As I do with all of my EPUB files, before I put them on my Kobo I pop them into Sigil to see if there are any problems.

I found that with this particular file, Calibre has inserted line breaks that take off the first letter of a word at the start of the paragraph and puts another line under it.

Here is the code:

<p class="calibre1"></p>

<div class="calibre10">
M
</div>

<p>y jailers merely tightened their hold and frog-marched me when I wobbled. Suckers are very strong; they may not have noticed that they were now bearing nearly all my weight as my knees gave and my feet lost their purchase on the ragged ground.</p>

Does anyone know how to fix this without having to go through every single paragraph of the story? I'd like to do it with a find/replace thing if possible (using Sigil??).

Your help would be very much appreciated as I want to get to read my book ASAP!

Thanks

That looks like a "Dropcap" conversion that has gone wrong

Except you said: every single paragraph , not Chapter starts.

What did the original visually look like? Something special with the first letter of every Paragraph?

The other thing I noticed is there were no styles in the regular paragraphs.
Maybe a Guru will be by to help?

[Katdragon]

Originally Posted by theducks

That looks like a "Dropcap" conversion that has gone wrong

Except you said: every single paragraph , not Chapter starts.

What did the original visually look like? Something special with the first letter of every Paragraph?

The other thing I noticed is there were no styles in the regular paragraphs.
Maybe a Guru will be by to help?

Ack! I should have checked this earlier but when I "view" it in Calibre the original PDB file has the same problem *sobs*.

The lack of styles in the paragraphs is probably due to the fact that I ran the EPUB through KoboBulkFix in order to sort out the font problem.

Given that, is there some sort of html editor that will let me do a search for those elements and delete everything except the letter inside it? Or another solution?

Thanks

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Katdragon

Ack! I should have checked this earlier but when I "view" it in Calibre the original PDB file has the same problem *sobs*.

The lack of styles in the paragraphs is probably due to the fact that I ran the EPUB through KoboBulkFix in order to sort out the font problem.

Given that, is there some sort of html editor that will let me do a search for those elements and delete everything except the letter inside it? Or another solution?

Thanks

Sigil, the next section down.

Very be vewwey caweful Backup your book

S&R for the (whatever is between the letter and the rest)

</span><span class="stuff">

and replace it with nothing (TEST BEFORE COMMITTING) Watch out for Single letters: I, A, there you want to leave the space

[Katdragon]

Originally Posted by theducks

Sigil, the next section down.

Very be vewwey caweful Backup your book

S&R for the (whatever is between the letter and the rest)

</span><span class="stuff">

and replace it with nothing (TEST BEFORE COMMITTING) Watch out for Single letters: I, A, there you want to leave the space

Thanks for that - would you mind clarifying something though? I can't see any <span> codes in the htm files.

I'm a bit of a literal person so if you wouldn't mind using an example from the code that I posted to show how to do it properly?

Edit: I can post/pastebin you more code if need be.

Thanks so much

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Katdragon

Thanks for that - would you mind clarifying something though? I can't see any <span> codes in the htm files.

I'm a bit of a literal person so if you wouldn't mind using an example from the code that I posted to show how to do it properly?

Edit: I can post/pastebin you more code if need be.

Thanks so much

OH the DIV surrounds the Big letter, What surrounds the rest?
What you are trying to do is 1) keep the tags in balance (Every open has a close in the right place2) remove the trash between)

Without seeing a whole chapter (code), I would have a hard time guessing what needs removed and/or changing.

I have whole books that look clean and NO, Zero, Nada DIV tags. K.I.S.S. no fancy stuff, just indented paragraphs. A chapter header

<p class...>   stuff   </p>

Sigil colors the tags, if your balance is of, the color of the text is NO LONGER black. Balance before you leave , sigil will correct errors, If it has to remove most of the body to do it.
Do Frequent saves, every GOOD change

[Katdragon]

Originally Posted by theducks

OH the DIV surrounds the Big letter, What surrounds the rest

<p> </p> tags around every paragraph. Unfortunately the <p> tags are between that first letter and the rest of the first word in the paragraph.

Without seeing a whole chapter (code), I would have a hard time guessing what needs removed and/or changing.

I have put a sample up at http://pastebin.com/aX9s9XwP

I haven't included the whole text of the chapter, but enough to show the code at the start, end and in two paragraphs in the middle.

I have whole books that look clean and NO, Zero, Nada DIV tags. K.I.S.S. no fancy stuff, just indented paragraphs. A chapter header

<p class...>   stuff   </p>

Unfortunately removing the <div> tags made the code look cleaner but didn't solve the problem. I experimented with removing the <p> tags but considering they are the paragraph separators, I ended up with one big chunk of text *sigh*

Thanks for the info about the Sigil colouring, and your really nice efforts to help me out!

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by Katdragon

I have put a sample up at http://pastebin.com/aX9s9XwP

I changed the sample code to replace the

 <div> ...initial letter... </div>

with

<span> ...initial letter... </span>

then I moved the <p> at the start of the rest of the word to BEFORE the <span> ...initial letter... </span>.

But before I got satisfactory results (when previewing the .html in Firefox), I had to eliminate any white space AFTER the initial letter. This should not be required as all "white space" is ignored within .html files.

Below is my revised sample code to make it work as expected. Try this on your copy of the (.epub) ebook. I also provide a simple diffs comparison between your sample code and my revised code.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
  <title>McKinley_Sunshine</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="stylesheet.css" type="text/css" />
  
<style type="text/css">
@page { margin-bottom: 5.000000pt; margin-top: 5.000000pt; }
.calibre10 { font-weight: bold }
</style>
</head>

<body class="calibre">
  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <p><span class="calibre10">
    I</span>t was a dumb thing to do but it wasn't that dumb. There hadn't been any trouble out at the lake in years. And it was so exquisitely far from the rest of my life.</p>

  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <p><span class="calibre10">
    M</span>onday evening is our movie evening because we are celebrating having lived through another week. Sunday night we lock up at eleven or midnight and crawl home to die, and Monday (barring a few national holidays) is our day off. Ruby comes in on Mondays with her warrior cohort and attacks the coffeehouse with an assortment of high-tech blasting gear that would whack Godzilla into submission: those single-track military minds never think to ask their cleaning staff for help in giant lethal marauding creature matters. Thanks to Ruby, Charlie's Coffeehouse is probably the only place in Old Town where you are safe from the local cockroaches, which are approximately the size of chipmunks. You can hear them clicking when they canter across the cobblestones outside.</p>

  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <p><span class="calibre10">
    W</span>e'd begun the tradition of Monday evening movies seven years ago when I started slouching out of bed at four A.M. to get the bread going. Our first customers arrive at six-thirty and they want our Cinnamon Rolls as Big as Your Head and I am the one who makes them. I put the dough on to rise overnight and it is huge and puffy and waiting when I get there at four-thirty. By the time Charlie arrives at six to brew coffee and open the till (and, most of the year, start dragging the outdoor tables down the alley and out to the front), you can smell them baking. One of Ruby's lesser minions arrives at about five for the daily sweep- and mop-up. Except on Tuesdays, when the coffeehouse is gleaming and I am giving myself tendonitis trying to persuade stiff, surly, thirty-hour refrigerated dough that it's time to loosen up.</p>

  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <p><span class="calibre10">
    C</span>harlie is one of the big good guys in my universe. He gave me enough of a raise when I finished school (high school diploma by the skin of my teeth and the intercession of my subversive English teacher) and began working for him full time that I could afford my own place, and, even more important, he talked Mom into letting me have it.</p>

<p class="calibre1"></p>

  <div class="calibre2">
    <hr width="80%" class="calibre4" />
  </div>

  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <div class="calibre2">
    <hr width="50%" class="calibre4" />
  </div>

  <p class="calibre1"></p>

  <div class="calibre2">
    <span class="calibre3" id="pml_toc-1"></span>

    <div class="calibre7" id="calibre_pb_4"></div>
  </div>
</body>
</html>

Hope this works for you.

[Katdragon]

Thanks so much I'll try this after Masterchef!