Extracting text with ebook-convert: Confused about "pagebreak" option

[wolpi]

Hello,

I am trying to extract the text from various ebook formats to corresponding ".txt" files, and want to preserve page/chapter breaks (ideally with the "Formfeed" control character)

I found "ebook-convert"s "--chapter-mark" option with the "pagebreak" parameter, but am unable to figure out from the documentation how this is intended to work and if it might do what I am trying to achieve.

When I run the command like

ebook-convert "~/Book.epub" "~/Book.txt" --chapter-mark pagebreak

the command output shows the chapters detected in the Book.epub file, but in the generated Book.txt I can find nothing that can be interpreted as a pagebreak indicator.

This is running Calibre 9.2.1 on macOS 15

Thanks!

[theducks]

Originally Posted by wolpi

Hello,

I am trying to extract the text from various ebook formats to corresponding ".txt" files, and want to preserve page/chapter breaks (ideally with the "Formfeed" control character)

I found "ebook-convert"s "--chapter-mark" option with the "pagebreak" parameter, but am unable to figure out from the documentation how this is intended to work and if it might do what I am trying to achieve.

When I run the command like

ebook-convert "~/Book.epub" "~/Book.txt" --chapter-mark pagebreak

the command output shows the chapters detected in the Book.epub file, but in the generated Book.txt I can find nothing that can be interpreted as a pagebreak indicator.

This is running Calibre 9.2.1 on macOS 15

Thanks!

Control auto-detection of document structure.
I believe this is for the Input (source)

You selected .txt as an output .

The form feed character is a control character in ASCII and Unicode, historically used to tell printers to advance to the start of the next page.

Key Details:
ASCII Code: Decimal 12, Hex 0x0C, Unicode U+000C
Escape Sequence in C/Java/Python: \f
Purpose:
In printers: Moves the print head to the top of the next page.
In text files: Acts as a page break or section separator.

[wolpi]

Originally Posted by theducks

Control auto-detection of document structure.
I believe this is for the Input (source)

You selected .txt as an output .

Thank you for the reply, but I do not understand what you are trying to tell me here

I am aware what the purpose of the form feed character is.

Currently, I am using the "textract" Python module to extract text from pdf and epub files. This separates the resulting text with page break characters, but supports fewer file formats than Calibre.
So I was hoping to substitute "textract" with functionality from "ebook-convert".

[kovidgoyal]

The txt format does not have page or chapter break indicators. Convert to EPUB or similar and you will see the break indicators.