Anyone here ever seen csCF6BBF71 type style classes?

[Hitch]

First, lo (do I know my Peeps, or what?), sure enough, Wolfie found one just like it. I'm damned, but...same CSS, same "lump the whole fandangle thing together" (HTML), same everything. And still...nary a clue as to what MADE it. Hmmmm...

Originally Posted by darryl

I hope this client has paid you! Your description of what is happening does not give me a good feeling.

Oh, yes. We're a coin-operated ebook-maker; you put in the coins, and we go. No coins, no going. Lesson learned in a very, very hard way, years ago (in this racket. Who knew it would be rife with folks who are perfectly comfortable ripping you off?).

Originally Posted by darryl

By the way, one really improbably scenario. Presumably you sent him the completed file by email. Could his email client have mangled the attachment? I did see this once years ago where there was some sort of error related I think to decoding. My recollection is that it was only with the one particular email client and fixed by a reinstallation.

No, we never send files via eMail except in extraordinary circumstances. Even then, we'll send them via Hightail first. We provide secured download links to them. Yes, the links are sent via email, but the files themselves are not. The links only work if the user logs in from his registered device & IP.

Originally Posted by signum

Just a suggestion: look up the class name csCF6BBF71 on Google. A software company named DevExpress may be associated with it.

Hi: Yes, I saw that, too. It's true: GMTA! (Great Minds Think Alike).

Originally Posted by BobC

The DevExpress query from 3 years back does come up when I query

 p class="csCF6BBF71"

However most of the hits I get on this are mainly EBay or other e-commerce sites and related to "Obsessive Sexy Lingerie", however if you follow the link and examine the source of the page, what is returned by Google in their search results doesn't seem to be in the page in question.

BobC

Yes! I saw that, also--lots of sexy stuff. (Maybe my client was surfing and...eh, never mind...)

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I have seen that type of classes before on some shop websites. So, nothing to do with books.

Yes, but now we have TWO books (ePUBS) with these classes. Like tapioca, the plot thickens.

Originally Posted by PeterT

I get the feeling it's related to a third party editing control used in a range of tools including some used to build web pages for e-commerce sites.

Hell, Peter, your guess is as good as mine. I wonder...anyone around here used Dreamweaver anytime lately? Holy crap...could ".cs"= "Creative Suite?" And be from Dreamweaver? I thought about INDD, but...no. Nobody breathing would name their classes like that. Anyone know if ye olden Dreamweaver would create classes like this, for any reason?

Every paragraph, mind you, is text inside a span class inside a p class. The p class sets the alignment, the type of paragraph (text indent, block, etc.) the font size and the margins. The span sets the font color, background color (usu. transparent, mind you...), the font-family, font size (yes, twice now, in both the span and the p class, you're not wrong), font weight and style.


Hitch

[JSWolf]

I've just figured something out. The sites I mostly get back from a google/bing/yahoo search are online shops or links to ebay. But, none of these are in the USA. They are in other countries like Scandinavia.

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Hell, Peter, your guess is as good as mine. I wonder...anyone around here used Dreamweaver anytime lately? Holy crap...could ".cs"= "Creative Suite?" And be from Dreamweaver? I thought about INDD, but...no. Nobody breathing would name their classes like that. Anyone know if ye olden Dreamweaver would create classes like this, for any reason?

Every paragraph, mind you, is text inside a span class inside a p class. The p class sets the alignment, the type of paragraph (text indent, block, etc.) the font size and the margins. The span sets the font color, background color (usu. transparent, mind you...), the font-family, font size (yes, twice now, in both the span and the p class, you're not wrong), font weight and style.

Hitch

The name used csCF6BBF71 appears to be based on a hex number. That would be quite a huge number on its own (3479945073) and I can't see that anyone would need that many classes. It can't be purely random or we wouldn't see so many instances via web searches. The cs being in lowercase reinforces that it is a prefix and the remainder of the class is the variant (like the calibrenn classes produced by Calibre)

Break the number down to hex pairs and we get :

CF = 207
6B = 107
BF = 191
71 = 113

If the class was always applied to something with the same characteristics it might be a way of describing them, say the colour in RGBA format (this is a light shade of pink so not likely in an ebook). Is there anything in the css class definition that could be coded with four hex pairs ? If so the naming system used may be a reflection of what it is describing.

BobC

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BobC

The name used csCF6BBF71 appears to be based on a hex number. That would be quite a huge number on its own (3479945073) and I can't see that anyone would need that many classes. It can't be purely random or we wouldn't see so many instances via web searches. The cs being in lowercase reinforces that it is a prefix and the remainder of the class is the variant (like the calibrenn classes produced by Calibre)

Yes. That's sort of where I was going. Not the hex stuff, god knows. But generally.

Break the number down to hex pairs and we get :

CF = 207
6B = 107
BF = 191
71 = 113

Wowza. I didn't even think of that.

If the class was always applied to something with the same characteristics it might be a way of describing them, say the colour in RGBA format (this is a light shade of pink so not likely in an ebook). Is there anything in the css class definition that could be coded with four hex pairs ? If so the naming system used may be a reflection of what it is describing.

BobC

Well, Wolfie, Our Man In Havana, (what did I say? Did I call it?) managed to track down a sibling of my corrupted book. Inside, where it counts, this book is identical to what my client returned to me, in the essentials. What doesn't match is the text, solely. The rest:

• The style classes; the use of pts for fonts; the application of black to the color of the font. The transparent background color.
• the CSS sheet itself--the layout, etc.;
• The way the p and span classes are deployed in sets.
• the way the content is slammed into a single HTML file.
• and NOTHING--nothing--in the OPF. Nothing that points me to a perpetrator, uh, sorry, bookmaker/bookmaking software.

Are all identical.Wolfie tells me that this link is free to use, so, the book he found is here: https://bibliotecapemobil.ro/content...-_Viforul.epub .

I haven't had a chance to delve further, Bob, since just reading your post, but I most certainly shall. Can't be before Wednesday; I'm slammed with some video conferences that I cannot alter, between now and Weds. a.m. Nonetheless, ladies and gents (any other ladies here, now that I think about it?), here's the sibling ePUB for your sleuthing delight. I'd love to play Holmes with this, but it's going to have to wait.

Hitch

[BobC]

Well, I had a look at that book and you say it seems to have the same css styles and general look of the one you have problems with. Examining it content.opf has the following in it :

  <!-- Your OPF file was broken so Sigil tried to rebuild it for you. -->

So it had been worked on by Sigil at some point.

I worked back on the Romanian site to see if I could find if all the books they hosted were similar but they were not. The page that leads to the book itself, on the cover it shows "Editura : BookLand" which I took to be the source of their book. I have checked on www.bookland.com and the book doesn't appear to be on there. There is the whole trilogy at book-land.ro a site that doesn't appear to be associated with Bookland.com. It's possible the book we have here was derived from that version by splitting the trilogy into its three components.

BookLand(.com) is owned by Batmore Capital Ltd and the website is registered in the British Virgin Islands to a Sergey Leshchenko. Batmore Capital also own the OBREEY (Pocketbook) brand.

I located a free copy of Viforul on a Moldavian Book site (www.bestseller.md) and checked that out - it was clean.

I also note there is a new query (i.e. in the last day) on the DevExpress support site which mentions :

After each table editor added something like <p class="cs95E872D0"><span class="csCF6BBF71">&nbsp;</span></p>
It added blank spaces between images for this html...

https://www.devexpress.com/Support/C...etails/T366450

The query refers to their XtraRichEdit component.

Somewhere down the line it looks like your ebook has been through a modification using the above component. Perhaps your correspondent is using some web based service as he thinks just to view the file and it is getting modified by that. Either that or he's not admitting to editing your file.

BobC

[Little.Egret]

Originally Posted by BobC

Well,


The Viforul book's Author died in 1918 so his work is not yet in Life+70 category

What were you trying to say here ?

1946 is the cutoff for life+70

[BobC]

Originally Posted by Little.Egret

What were you trying to say here ?

1946 is the cutoff for life+70

I was talking rubbish - must have had a brainf**t . It wasn't all that relevant anyway.

I've amended my original post if anyone doesn't understand the above (cleaned up the crime scene).

BobC

[KevinH]

FWIW, after looking at the sample I think BobC has hit the nail on the head. I think the .cs rules in the stylesheet are just randomly assigned a name by converting a random integer to hex (all 4 bytes). I could see no pattern in any of the hex values in any of the CS names with regard to how or where they are used in the .html text files.

Someone has edited your ebook with DevExpress.com's XtraRichEdit Suite of tools and has not bothered to admit to it.

[Hitch]

Very quickly:

(I have a really crazy 24 hours coming up, so I'm racing like mad, thanks to you all, individually)...

It's weird. I'd seen that in a Google search--the DevExpress XRE Suite. I have never used it, or even really known of it, so I'd tabled that for future investigation. I didn't think it would pan out. Shows to go ya!

I wish I knew if that was used someplace ELSE. I can't, for the life of me, figure out how THIS client could get there. It's just...the whole bloody thing is bizarre.

Thanks, I mean it.

Hitch

[BetterRed]

DevExpress are best known for non-cheap .NET development tools, mainly used by corporate IT, Rich Text Edit control says

The DevExpress WinForms Rich Editor supports loading, saving, and conversion to and from today’s most popular text-based document formats including DOCX, HTML, RTF, TXT, XML, ODT, EPUB, MHT, and DOC. The XtraRichEdit™ Suite also supports conversion to PDF. Additionally, you can convert (load or save) documents from one format to another automatically using the DevExpress Rich Edit Document Server.

I had to use DevExpress once on a software development contract (corporate IT diktakt), the generated code was diabolical, but that's the nature of them beasts. Goodness that was a long time ago - 2003ish

Added : Actually maybe not so long - memory is funny, that job seems long, long ago, yet my work at Xerox 20 years earlier than that often seems like last year.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

DevExpress are best known for non-cheap .NET development tools, mainly used by corporate IT, Rich Text Edit control says



I had to use DevExpress once on a software development contract (corporate IT diktakt), the generated code was diabolical, but that's the nature of them beasts. Goodness that was a long time ago - 2003ish

Added : Actually maybe not so long - memory is funny, that job seems long, long ago, yet my work at Xerox 20 years earlier than that often seems like last year.

BR

The thing is, Red--just like my kerfuffled brain before, NONE of that makes sense for this guy. He worked for one of the boroughs in NYC, until retirement. He's patently unknowledgeable about eBooks, and anything tech. He still has a yahoo.com email address. Both the expense, and the arcane part of it, just don't jive with this client.

It's got to be the back end for some automagic conversion via a browser. I can't see anything else that makes any sense. OR, some freebie download for automagic conversion.

Thanks VERY much for the info.

Hmph.

Hitch

[Hitch]

Update:

So, this client tells us, gosh, he can't email us, and he can't let us know this or that, because he's going to these really REMOTE areas. For weeks, adn this is why he can't down-/up-load his book files, etc. In a fit of despair, I tell him, screw it, I'll upload the bloody things, at least then, I'll know that the right file got where it was going, right? No charge; at this point, I just want the agony to STOP.

and then...

Spoiler:

We get an odd transmission, into our Project Management System (which is on Teamwork Projects SAS)...

A VIDEO of his RV as he's vacationing. He can, by god, send bloody VIDEO, but can he download and then upload that 420kb *&^%$#@! eBOOK! Oh, frack, NOOOOOOOoooooo. Can't do THAT...

<SIGH>

Hitch

[BetterRed]

@Hitch - let's say your client writes in Word or Writer. Let's say they've realised that what they sent you has a substantial error - e.g a chapter out of order which screwed up the plot, or made text factually incorrect. So they find something that converts the EPUB to DOCX/ODT that happens to use the DevExp tools, after they've made the necessary changes to the substance of the book in Word/Writer they convert the saved DOCX/ODT back to EPUB using the same tool.

Suggestion : reduce the original and butchered epubs back to plain text and run them through the Beyond Compare washing machine to determine if the actual text of the book has been changed.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

@Hitch - let's say your client writes in Word or Writer. Let's say they've realised that what they sent you has a substantial error - e.g a chapter out of order which screwed up the plot, or made text factually incorrect. So they find something that converts the EPUB to DOCX/ODT that happens to use the DevExp tools, after they've made the necessary changes to the substance of the book in Word/Writer they convert the saved DOCX/ODT back to EPUB using the same tool.

Suggestion : reduce the original and butchered epubs back to plain text and run them through the Beyond Compare washing machine to determine if the actual text of the book has been changed.

BR

Red:

Ooooh, aren't you a clever lad? Indeed. That's an excellent idea. I'll do that as soon as I'm out from under my video-conf. requirements for this week. Naughty thing; you should go into this business. (Well, wait--I wouldn't wish that on anyone, but, what I meant was You'd be very good at scoping out all that bad client behavior.

Hitch

[darryl]

Originally Posted by Hitch

The thing is, Red--just like my kerfuffled brain before, NONE of that makes sense for this guy. He worked for one of the boroughs in NYC, until retirement. He's patently unknowledgeable about eBooks, and anything tech. He still has a yahoo.com email address. Both the expense, and the arcane part of it, just don't jive with this client.

My experience is that such people often rely upon friends for computer support and the like, few of whom are professionals in the area. Some are very good, but some ........