[Conversion Plugin] KFX Input

[bustacap]

Originally Posted by mallomar

Hi, I'm having an issue where the pages of a fixed layout KFX are all jumbled. Thought something went wrong in the conversion despite using From KFX to Convert Selected Book to EPUB but I tried uploading the KFX in Calibre to my Kindle, in airplane mode and it has the same issues. This is the book. I can upload a scrambed EPUB of the converted file if it would help.

the sample looks broken already so its very likely just the book

[mallomar]

Originally Posted by bustacap

the sample looks broken already so its very likely just the book

Huh, that's bizarre. Even stranger is that the Kindle edition has two five star reviews. I opened it on Kindle PC and that it is indeed broken. I put in a complaint to Amazon.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by mallomar

Hi, I'm having an issue where the pages of a fixed layout KFX are all jumbled.

I took a look at the free sample of that book. It was formatted incorrectly by the publisher in a way that causes it to display poorly.

It is a typical children's book, pages are mostly images with some text. However instead of using the proper Kindle print replica format, the publisher used reflowable layout with each page having an associated background image. That renders poorly. In most cases the reader sees only part of each full page image.

[tomsem]

I have discovered a couple of minor issues using From KFX to ePub when the source is print replica:

1) there is no <meta name="cover" ... > tag so ePub reading systems seem not to generate a cover thumbnail to display in the book listing.

2) I do not know what implications are for ePub reading systems, but if you open the ePub in Kindle Previewer, it doesn't stretch the page image to fill display. ePubs generated from other KFX fixed-layout formats (comic book/manga/childrens, and whatever we might call KFX that contains positioned text, similar to FXL ePub) will stretch to fill.

I sometimes get PDF format for comics (e.g. Humble Bundle) and they often have searchable text in them.

For Kindle platform it sorta works okay to use Send to Kindle to convert to print replica (after fixing up metadata and maybe adding navigation/bookmarks). The text remains searchable and selectable, but one downside is there is no way to see 'spreads' as print replica only supports display of one page at a time.

I also like to have ePub format for everything, but calibre does not convert to FXL ePub, and while KCC maybe will, it will not preserve ToC, much less migrate text.

So I was trying to take the print replica which S2K created and use that as input for From KFX.

It turns out having FXL ePub with text is not the 'win' it should be. So far I have not found a reading system that will do text search or selection with this; Thorium will try to read it out but generally FXL does not have any reading order defined so it is kinda useless. S2K converts to KF8 fixed layout, which again doesn't support text search or selection.

So going forward I will probably just use Kindle Create to generate comic format KFX from the PDF, use that for side loading and conversion to ePub, and generate a PDF for Send To Kindle for reading with Kindle apps etc.

Ergo I won't have any use case for converting print replica KFX to anything but PDF (only way to get one is to create personal document from PDF with S2K, or from Kindle store and the still functioning Kindle for PC method). So fixing ePub conversion isn't something at least I need.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by tomsem

I have discovered a couple of minor issues using From KFX to ePub when the source is print replica:

1) there is no <meta name="cover" ... > tag so ePub reading systems seem not to generate a cover thumbnail to display in the book listing.

The <meta name="cover"> element should be added to an EPUB generated from a print replica book as long as the original book has the cover image indicated in its KFX metadata. I have seen this in print replica Amazon books I have used for testing. If you provide some examples of print replica books from Amazon that do not generate this meta element I will look into it further.

Originally Posted by tomsem

2) I do not know what implications are for ePub reading systems, but if you open the ePub in Kindle Previewer, it doesn't stretch the page image to fill display. ePubs generated from other KFX fixed-layout formats (comic book/manga/childrens, and whatever we might call KFX that contains positioned text, similar to FXL ePub) will stretch to fill.

I am not surprised that Kindle Previewer might render oddly. It is not designed for that purpose. It generally produces MOBI/KF8 format when provided a fixed-layout EPUB as input.

This plugin's conversion of KFX print replica to fixed layout EPUB exists mostly to expose the content present in the fixed layout book. It will not round trip back to Amazon and was never tested on other reading platforms.

[tomsem]

Originally Posted by jhowell

The <meta name="cover"> element should be added to an EPUB generated from a print replica book as long as the original book has the cover image indicated in its KFX metadata. I have seen this in print replica Amazon books I have used for testing. If you provide some examples of print replica books from Amazon that do not generate this meta element I will look into it further.

This was with a personal document, which Amazon does not generate cover images for (it would be nice if they did). It's simple enough to manually add tag should I ever want to.

I will check to see if it shows up for store content, I just imported one a couple of days ago.
[update: yep those get <meta> tag]

[victorscarpes]

Hey, y'all. I'm trying to use the "From KFX" option to convert a bunch of fixed-layout KFX comics (created using Kindle Create in Comic mode) into CBZ files. The conversion itself works perfectly fine, but my issue is that I need to do it manually for each volume. The thing is I have over 1500 comic books that I want to convert. I've been doing it manually, but it's a drag. Is there some way to automate it? The standard Calibre conversion pipeline can by applied for batches of titles. Is there a technical reason why the same can't be done with the "From KFX" option? Thanks in advance.

[jhowell]

Originally Posted by victorscarpes

The standard Calibre conversion pipeline can by applied for batches of titles. Is there a technical reason why the same can't be done with the "From KFX" option? Thanks in advance.

As I wrote previously:

Originally Posted by jhowell

I plan to eventually allow From KFX to support conversion of multiple books via a background job so that the UI is not tied up during conversion, but I do not have a time frame for that. Other things are keeping me busy at the moment.

I still plan to do that, but do not know when and I am about to go on vacation so it won’t be soon.

[victorscarpes]

Originally Posted by jhowell

As I wrote previously:



I still plan to do that, but do not know when and I am about to go on vacation so it won’t be soon.

Ah, ok. Sorry for not reading the previous post. Anyway, enjoy your vacation and thanks for all the amazing work you've already done.