Badly formatted eBooks

[rakulos]

As a minor aside, the pdf conversions can be often fixed in by converting to word and using various replacements; i.e. modify the line breaks, either paragraph marks ( ^p in Word ) or end-of-line marks ( ^l in Word ).

I've added a commen conversion pattern below but youll almost definitely need to change it - the trick is to differentiate between a paragraph return and a 'false' return.


convert ^p^p^p to ^p^p
convert ^p^p to @@@@@@
convert ."^p to ."######
?"^p to ?"######
!"^p to !"######
.^p to .######
.)^p to .)######


remove all ^p - may have to replace with a space, depends on doc (can crash a lot here)

convert ###### to ^p
convert @@@@@@ to ^p^p

Conversion rules vary by file but you can end up turning any weirdly formatted Gutenburg text into a properly formatted epub in a few steps without having to resort to much manual typing. Apologies if this is old news to you.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Maybe some came from Smashwords. The meatgrinder there is atrocious.

It isn't the meatgrinder, it's people not formatting their text properly for it. Before JA Konrath went Amazon exclusive his ebooks on Smashwords were just as well formatted as the Amazon ones.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by AlexBell

This is simply not true for ePub books. In fact it's the main attraction of ePub books. Just for one example, my work plan when designing ePub format ebooks is to do an initial layout version with the text consisting only of lorem ipsum pig latin. When the layout is right, then I edit it to enter the text. And then I proof read it, and edit it to correct any typos etc.

And for another example I've often edited ePub books designed by others to correct typos and other mistakes.

If one has a basic knowledge of HTML and stylesheets it is easy to edit ePub ebooks.

Mobis are just as easy if you extract the html with Mobiunpack.

[Katsunami]

Thanks all. As I have advanced knowledge of html, and Jswolf pointed me to Sigil, editing epub books won't be difficult for me. If I am going to read one of the classics or PD book and it could be formatted better, I'll see what I can do.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Mobis are just as easy if you extract the html with Mobiunpack.

Yes, but let's not forget that they use a secret pidgin HTML loosely based on HTML 3.2, so the output is limited.

[ByronA]

Hi,

I am a bit confused here and need some advice,

I have a word dokument and want to use Sigil and Calibre to,

Should i convert it to a pdf or??

[ByronA]

Hi,

I am a bit confused here and need some advice,

I have a word dokument and want to use Sigil and Calibre to,

Should i convert it to a pdf or??

[Katsunami]

Convert it to EPUB using Calibre, then edit the EPUB using Sigil.

Just hope that the EPUB will be understandable with regard to editing; it's impossible to say what Calibre will do while converting. It depends on the Word document.

In this post I blatantly assume that Calibre can convert Word files. If it can't, then first save the Word document as a PDF (using a PDF printer for example), and then convert the PDF to EPUB.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

If it can't, then first save the Word document as a PDF (using a PDF printer for example), and then convert the PDF to EPUB.

I would actually advise you not to do this, because you will generally get a very bad result when working from a non-text format back to text.

Calibre should be able to handle Word/RTF documents directly, but if you want to fine-tune things, then export as filtered HTML from Word and then run the conversion.

[BeccaPrice]

if it's a word document, save it as filtered web (HTML), and then convert.

[AlexBell]

Originally Posted by roth2006

I'm just wondering why many of the free books downloaded from Amazon are so very bad. I did not expect that, and hope that paid books wil be -way- better.

Do not hold your breath. Many of them are good; the absolute worst ebook I have ever seen was a fairly expensive one published by Amazon. I tried to give it a minus 10 in the rating

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

In this post I blatantly assume that Calibre can convert Word files. If it can't, then first save the Word document as a PDF (using a PDF printer for example), and then convert the PDF to EPUB.

No, no, no - a thousand times no.

NEVER use PDF as a conversion format unless you have absolutely no alternative. PDF files do not store text, and conversion from PDF is "problematic" to put it mildly.

[Katsunami]

BeccaPrice's suggestion is indeed better. I forgot that Word can store files as Html.... I haven't used this program for a long time.