What text editor converts best with Calibre?

[Bobosmite]

Is there a more Calibre-compatible text editor other than Word to edit .RTF docs? No matter how I try, I can't seem to get a Word .RTF to convert to .MOBI as it appears on the screen. Maybe with a more basic text editor, I can get better output.

[itimpi]

The problem is probably because you are using RTF as the format. If using Word then saving the file as HTM (filtered) is likely to give the best match with what you see after conversion.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Bobosmite

Is there a more Calibre-compatible text editor other than Word to edit .RTF docs? No matter how I try, I can't seem to get a Word .RTF to convert to .MOBI as it appears on the screen. Maybe with a more basic text editor, I can get better output.

Just a Nitpick.

Word is not a TEXT editor. It is a Word Processor.

Notepad++, even Notepad.exe , is a 'text' editor.

Text editors can't insert pictures, change fonts except by tagging them for other programs

I stress this because we give (advanced level) instructions here to open certain files in a TEXT EDITOR, and if a Word Processor is used, it may insert its extra stuff and corrupt a file forever.

[dwig]

Originally Posted by Bobosmite

Is there a more Calibre-compatible text editor other than Word to edit .RTF docs? No matter how I try, I can't seem to get a Word .RTF to convert to .MOBI as it appears on the screen. Maybe with a more basic text editor, I can get better output.

Ebook formats do not support most of the layout and font controls available in high power word processors like MS Word. It's not so much a matter of calibre's abilities as it is the limitations of the final output format.

You may find that using a simpler word processor that has far fewer special functions is better for you than simply learning to limit what features you use in Word. If you are working on Windows, you might give the often overlooked WordPad app a look. Its feature set is much more basic and its RTF files are vastly simpler than Word's.

[kacir]

Originally Posted by Bobosmite

Is there a more Calibre-compatible text editor other than Word to edit .RTF docs? No matter how I try, I can't seem to get a Word .RTF to convert to .MOBI as it appears on the screen. Maybe with a more basic text editor, I can get better output.

Create a short rtf with several different programs and then open it with text editor, such as notepad or textpad or vim or whatever and observe the differences. Rtf file is plain text file with a few formatting tags. In the past I had scripts to create rtf documents from plain text. I just tacked on header and the last two lines stolen from well formatted Wordpad document, and put tag '/Par' at the end of each paragraph. Worked like a charm. (see http://www.biblioscape.com/rtf15_spec.htm for more details about rtf formatting)
Most Word processors output VERY ugly and convoluted mess instead of clean rtf.
Go ahead. Just create an rtf document with just one sentence in Wordpad and MSWord and perhaps another word processor, open them in Notepad.exe and see the difference.

Wordpad form Windows XP (ver. 5.1) produces *very* nice and clean rtf file. You will have to try out Windows 7 version of Wordpad as I haven't examined its rtf output. Wordpad is included in standard Windows installation, in the Accessories menu.
When working on Linux or FreeBSD, I use "Ted text editor" http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/ . Despite its name, it is in fact a Word Processor ;-)

The difference between Word Processor and Text editor is that in a Word Processor you can format text to bold, italics, you can format paragraphs, justification, ...
In text editor you just edit plain texts, C source codes, html source codes, configuration files and suchlike.

You can also try OpenOffice.org, or its better fork Libre Office - http://www.libreoffice.org/download/ .
Just do not use rtf format. Use native *.odt format. Calibre can convert odf format. Odt, is even VERY similar to epub. The similarity is so great, that when you rename *.odt to *.odt.epub some programs for reading epubs (for example the one in my e-ink reader) can display the text.

[Bobosmite]

Originally Posted by dwig

Ebook formats do not support most of the layout and font controls available in high power word processors like MS Word. It's not so much a matter of calibre's abilities as it is the limitations of the final output format.

This is something I didn't expect when I switched making physical books to making ebooks.

What I've been doing in Word is to copy/paste from my .RTF to a blank .TXT file. This preserves the graphics and italics, which is all I'm concerned with. This also removes all the Styles and gives me a clean base document to work with. Where I need a page break, I tag a blank line or text with the Heading 1 Style. That seems to work in a roundabout way if I try not to get fancy.

Using Wordpad seems to do the same thing as far as cleaning the doc of Styles, but I don't know how to insert <h1>, or breaks, into the text. Is that possible? If so, I'd be good to go using Wordpad for all my ebooks.

[jackie_w]

If you're most comfortable with MSWord as your creation tool then the simplest workflow is to

1. Open your .RTF or .DOC file in Word
2. Mark chapter headings/sub-headings with the built-in Word styles 'Heading 1', 'Heading 2', etc 'Heading 1' is equivalent to <h1> in html, 'Heading 2' to <h2> etc etc
3. Don't bother including chapter page breaks in the RTF/DOC, Calibre will insert them for you at chapter breaks.
4. File - SaveAs - Webpage-filtered. This will create an HTML file (plus a directory containing any embedded images if there are any)
5. Import the resultant HTML file into Calibre, which will also automatically include relevant images from the image directory. Calibre will change the HTML file to a .ZIP file during the import.
6. Use Calibre to convert ZIP-to-MOBI making sure that the Convert - StructureDetection page contains a suitable entry in 'Detect chapters at' box to match what you did in step 2. Set 'Chapter mark' to 'pagebreak'
7. Fill in the Level 1 TOC and Level 2 TOC boxes on the Convert - TOC page, again to match what you did in step 2.
   If your TOC only has one level, I think you can skip this step.

[Bobosmite]

I can't wait to try this. Converting anything is always about jumping through the right hoops in the right order and this one I haven't tried yet.

[frostschutz]

If possible, don't use Word or any kind of WYSIWYG editor. They focus too much on how things look like, and too little on how things are structured. So it's easy to get errors into your document, e.g. by indenting with spaces instead of setting an indent property, because in the WYSIWYG it just looks the same either way. Once you put that on your reader you will pay dearly for those errors, as readers only care about the structure.

Use a text editor with syntax highlighting and write HTML. Or if that's too hard, go with something like reStructuredText, Markdown or similar. Anything is fine as long as it does not hide the structure from you.

If you absolutely have to stay with Word, then learn how to structure things with Word properly without using tricks like spaces. It's not impossible to do, just incredibly hard as making "invisible" mistakes is so easy in Word.

[osnova]

If you like working in Word (or can't work with html in a real text editor such as emeditor), then I recommend working in Atlantis Word Processor, then saving to html and then converting to mobi with Mobipocket Creator/kindlegen/Calibre. Atlantis looks and acts like Word but produces a much cleaner html than Word.

As said above, .rtf > .mobi is not a good route.

Alternatively, you can save to epub in Atlantis and then use kindlegen to convert to .mobi.

[jackie_w]

I agree that MSWord is not the best way of producing simple, clean html -- unless you're totally rigorous how you apply formatting. However, when you're starting out with ebooks it helps if you don't have to completely change the way you've been working for years... or at least not all at once. It's worth giving your existing Word docs a try and see if you're happy with the results. As a long time Word user myself, I learned quite a lot over the months (trial & error) about how to manipulate it to get cleaner html which works pretty well with Calibre.

[Bobosmite]

Originally Posted by jackie_w

I agree that MSWord is not the best way of producing simple, clean html -- unless you're totally rigorous how you apply formatting.

I just happen to be one of those and your method worked fantastically. Saving it to a filtered .HTM stripped the Office-specific tags and from that point it converted exactly as it appeared on the screen, with a TOC.

Thanks!

[jackie_w]

You're welcome. I'm glad you got some good results. eBooks don't have to be painful, after all