Converting eReader books - Page 2

itimpi · 07-26-2009, 10:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Statch

Now I have what is probably a stupid question. One of the many things I love about Calibre is being able to have all formats of the book show up in one place. (Meaning, when I click on the title in Calibre, I can see which formats of it I have and open any of them.) When I use the command line to produce the epub format from the html format, and then use the Gui to add the book to the library, it sees it as another title with the same name, rather than as an alternate format of the same title. (Am I making sense?) How can I make that right?

If you already have the book in the library, then do not add it via "Add Book", but instead find the book in the GUI and then use the "Edit Metadata" dialog which gives you the format to add a new format to an existing book entry.

carlobee · 07-26-2009, 10:29 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Statch

I should also specify that I've been having this problem with all books I've used ereader2html on, and they are just standard run-of-the-mill books published by large publishing houses.

exactly. been having problems with some of these too. but some work perfectly.

user_none · 07-26-2009, 10:32 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Statch

Using the GUI, I had tried specifying cp1252, which produced funny characters in front of the quotes and em-dashes, and I tried not specifying anything, which removed the quotes and em-dashes altogether. When I did it from the command line, using the syntax the previous poster mentioned, I got perfect output.

Seems to be a problem that multiple people are running into... What OS are you using?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Statch

Now I have what is probably a stupid question. One of the many things I love about Calibre is being able to have all formats of the book show up in one place. (Meaning, when I click on the title in Calibre, I can see which formats of it I have and open any of them.) When I use the command line to produce the epub format from the html format, and then use the Gui to add the book to the library, it sees it as another title with the same name, rather than as an alternate format of the same title. (Am I making sense?) How can I make that right?

Click the title in the library, click edit metadata, on the top right there is a list of all formats, use the add button to add a format to that book.

Statch · 07-26-2009, 02:12 PM

Thanks to both of you for the answer on how to make one record with all the formats.

I'm using Windows XP.

tfarrell · 07-26-2009, 03:00 PM

My experience with ereader books is that some of them apparently "just work" because they don't use any of the offending characters: they use three periods instead of an ellipsis character, a hyphen instead of an em-dash, etc. I think it has more to do with the way the individual book than the fact that it comes from ereader.

I'm not brilliant with character encodings, it's not something I deal with often in my programming, but I would think that if we put in a function that would detect and replace unusual characters with their character entity encodings (for example, ampersand rsquo; for a right single quote) it might work a lot better. (I had been doing a little of this manually to make my books work better and was going to write a short program to do it for me, but am not going to bother now that I see that I can do it from the command line and it works fine.)

kovidgoyal · 07-26-2009, 03:58 PM

See http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/ticket/2923

FizzyWater · 07-26-2009, 08:40 PM

I convert almost exclusively from eReader and the GUI works for me...but I'm still zipping my HTML and image files before importing them to Calibre. Would that make the difference? (I read your ticket notes and haven't had to do this...yet).

kovidgoyal · 07-26-2009, 08:49 PM

If you zip them up before hand, specifying the input encoding in the GUI will work, as the html is not processed when adding the book.

FizzyWater · 07-26-2009, 08:53 PM

Is there a benefit to not zipping the files? What kind of pre-processing does Calibre do to the HTML that would make it beneficial to allow it to happen?

kovidgoyal · 07-26-2009, 09:03 PM

Basically it collects all the linked to files for you

Mordak · 07-27-2009, 01:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tfarrell

My experience with ereader books is that some of them apparently "just work" because they don't use any of the offending characters: they use three periods instead of an ellipsis character, a hyphen instead of an em-dash, etc. I think it has more to do with the way the individual book than the fact that it comes from ereader.

I've had exactly the same experience - some books just work, and some books have messed up characters. It depends on the publisher, and a single bookstore sometimes has books that use the odd characters and sometimes does not.

For me, I work around the issue with just a text editor. I use SubEthaEdit to open the document, use the select menu at the bottom of the window to Reinterpret as Windows Latin 1, and then use the same menu to Convert to UTF-8. It only takes a few seconds, and afterwards they import into Calibre and convert to ePub without difficulty.

Sometimes I have found books that use weird &#XXX codes to specify quotes and dashes that display fine in a web browser, but do not display correctly on my PRS-505, in which case I just use the SubEthaEdit to find/replace the offending characters, then re-import and convert. A little laborious, but it gets the job done.

ficbot · 07-27-2009, 04:06 PM

All right, I have a new system

These books have been giving me more trouble lately, not sure why. And using Neo Office to generate an HTML file has been resulting in extra line breaks. So, on a mac, here is what I have been doing:

1) Run the macro to extract the html from the secure file
2) Open in Firefox, select all text, paste into Neo Office as unformatted text
3) Save as RTF
4) Open RTF file in Pages, turn on search for invisibles
5) Search for 3 paragraph marks, replace with 2
6) Save again as RTF, Select all and copy
7) Open Komposer (web editing program)
8) Paste in the RTF text
9) Give a final once-over, save as HTML
10) Import into Calibre, edit metadata, convert to LRF

Kovid says I could probably convert the exploded file straight to epub and not get the line spacing issues and centering issues I get with LRF. Have not tried that yet.

Kostas · 07-27-2009, 04:29 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ficbot

All right, I have a new system

These books have been giving me more trouble lately, not sure why. And using Neo Office to generate an HTML file has been resulting in extra line breaks.

If you can use MS Word, I think that saving the html file with the "save as html, filtered" option resolves the extra line breaks problem and can save you the pain of all this workaround.
Of course, you still would have to replace the 3 line breaks occurences by 2 before saving the file.

mjmcleod · 07-28-2009, 01:39 AM

To fix the ereader2html.py script itself, open it in a text editor and look for the line that contains:

final = '<html><body>\n'

There should be only one such line.

Change it to read:

final = '<html><head><META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; c
harset=cp1252"/></head><body>\n'

(all one line.)

Now the HTML files it produces will properly declare themselves to be in cp1252 and the Calibre GUI will handle them correctly.

Statch · 07-29-2009, 07:44 PM

You're all so smart! Post #21, I looked at the resolution of the help ticket, and I'm afraid I just don't get it. What you said to add shows up for me as a slider bar?

#29, what a beautiful solution! I'm using a version of ereader2html that some nice person made into a little gui, so it doesn't work for me, but I wish it did. (Unfortunately, I don't remember where I downloaded the thing from, so can't credit the creator. I click on a file called "er" and just answer some questions.)

#28, using MS Word and saving the file as a 'web page, filtered' worked for me. It loses some of the metadata, but it's easy to put that back in Calibre. Problem solved.

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07-26-2009, 02:12 PM	#19
Statch Connoisseur Posts: 96 Karma: 2084 Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Georgia, USA Device: Kindle PW2, Samsung Galaxy 3, Kindle Fire HD	Thanks to both of you for the answer on how to make one record with all the formats. I'm using Windows XP.

07-26-2009, 03:00 PM	#20
tfarrell Member Posts: 12 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2009 Device: kindle 2	My experience with ereader books is that some of them apparently "just work" because they don't use any of the offending characters: they use three periods instead of an ellipsis character, a hyphen instead of an em-dash, etc. I think it has more to do with the way the individual book than the fact that it comes from ereader. I'm not brilliant with character encodings, it's not something I deal with often in my programming, but I would think that if we put in a function that would detect and replace unusual characters with their character entity encodings (for example, ampersand rsquo; for a right single quote) it might work a lot better. (I had been doing a little of this manually to make my books work better and was going to write a short program to do it for me, but am not going to bother now that I see that I can do it from the command line and it works fine.)

07-26-2009, 03:58 PM	#21
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,359 Karma: 27182818 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	See http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/ticket/2923

07-26-2009, 08:40 PM	#22
FizzyWater You kids get off my lawn! Posts: 4,220 Karma: 73492664 Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Columbus, Ohio Device: Oasis 2 and Libra H2O and half a dozen older models I can't let go of	I convert almost exclusively from eReader and the GUI works for me...but I'm still zipping my HTML and image files before importing them to Calibre. Would that make the difference? (I read your ticket notes and haven't had to do this...yet).

07-26-2009, 08:49 PM	#23
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,359 Karma: 27182818 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	If you zip them up before hand, specifying the input encoding in the GUI will work, as the html is not processed when adding the book.

07-26-2009, 08:53 PM	#24
FizzyWater You kids get off my lawn! Posts: 4,220 Karma: 73492664 Join Date: Aug 2007 Location: Columbus, Ohio Device: Oasis 2 and Libra H2O and half a dozen older models I can't let go of	Is there a benefit to not zipping the files? What kind of pre-processing does Calibre do to the HTML that would make it beneficial to allow it to happen?

07-26-2009, 09:03 PM	#25
kovidgoyal creator of calibre Posts: 45,359 Karma: 27182818 Join Date: Oct 2006 Location: Mumbai, India Device: Various	Basically it collects all the linked to files for you

07-27-2009, 04:06 PM	#27
ficbot Wizard Posts: 2,409 Karma: 4132096 Join Date: Sep 2008 Device: Kindle Paperwhite/iOS Kindle App	All right, I have a new system These books have been giving me more trouble lately, not sure why. And using Neo Office to generate an HTML file has been resulting in extra line breaks. So, on a mac, here is what I have been doing: 1) Run the macro to extract the html from the secure file 2) Open in Firefox, select all text, paste into Neo Office as unformatted text 3) Save as RTF 4) Open RTF file in Pages, turn on search for invisibles 5) Search for 3 paragraph marks, replace with 2 6) Save again as RTF, Select all and copy 7) Open Komposer (web editing program) 8) Paste in the RTF text 9) Give a final once-over, save as HTML 10) Import into Calibre, edit metadata, convert to LRF Kovid says I could probably convert the exploded file straight to epub and not get the line spacing issues and centering issues I get with LRF. Have not tried that yet.

07-28-2009, 01:39 AM	#29
mjmcleod Connoisseur Posts: 55 Karma: 11501 Join Date: Jul 2009 Location: Australia Device: Galaxy Tab	To fix the ereader2html.py script itself, open it in a text editor and look for the line that contains: final = '<html><body>\n' There should be only one such line. Change it to read: final = '<html><head><META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; c harset=cp1252"/></head><body>\n' (all one line.) Now the HTML files it produces will properly declare themselves to be in cp1252 and the Calibre GUI will handle them correctly.

07-29-2009, 07:44 PM	#30
Statch Connoisseur Posts: 96 Karma: 2084 Join Date: Aug 2008 Location: Georgia, USA Device: Kindle PW2, Samsung Galaxy 3, Kindle Fire HD	You're all so smart! Post #21, I looked at the resolution of the help ticket, and I'm afraid I just don't get it. What you said to add shows up for me as a slider bar? #29, what a beautiful solution! I'm using a version of ereader2html that some nice person made into a little gui, so it doesn't work for me, but I wish it did. (Unfortunately, I don't remember where I downloaded the thing from, so can't credit the creator. I click on a file called "er" and just answer some questions.) #28, using MS Word and saving the file as a 'web page, filtered' worked for me. It loses some of the metadata, but it's easy to put that back in Calibre. Problem solved.

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