iPhone 101: iPhone+Stanza+Calibre (the almost-perfect solution)

[jayman]

Did it used to work? I'm just surprised no one has really brought it up before unless I missed it.

[scotchy007]

Hey guys, just wanted to let u know that i successfully used Calibre to convert all my old Mobipocket books, then used an app called IPhone Explorer to transfer them via USB to my IPhone. No wifi, no internet needed. Totally happy right now. Yaaaaayyyyyyy

[pking36330]

Originally Posted by jayman

I had posted this in another forum but it seems more appropriate here. When I download newspapers and magazines using calibre and the standard recipes, the links are not clickable on stanza. That is, you click on an item highlighted in the table of contents and it takes you back to the beginning of the table of contents and not the article. It's weird though because if you take a .prc book and convert it to epub those links work. Anyone else having this issue with stanza? It really kinda blows and makes trying to read the newspapers on stanza useless.

Originally Posted by pking36330

The problem is (I think) that Stanza and the screen divided in thirds vertically and if you press on the left third you go back a page, the right third you go forward a page and the center third brings up the Options overlay, so there is no 'third' left to actually select a hyperlink. The links appear to be in the text, Stanza just doesn't provide a GUI that lets you select them. And if this problem summary is correct, then it is certainly not a Calibre problem, its a Stanza GUI problem.

Ahhh...I figured it out. I hate when its clearly explained in the instructions and I just haven't read them.

To select a link in Stanza, press and hold the link until it highlights in yellow and then it will flip a page to show a browser window with the content from that link. If you want more than on that page, you have to select the Safari button at the top right to continue discovering the content on the web page.

[jayman]

Originally Posted by pking36330

Ahhh...I figured it out. I hate when its clearly explained in the instructions and I just haven't read them.

To select a link in Stanza, press and hold the link until it highlights in yellow and then it will flip a page to show a browser window with the content from that link. If you want more than on that page, you have to select the Safari button at the top right to continue discovering the content on the web page.

I don't think that pertains to what we are talking about however. I think you're referring to html links. What is being discussed here are links to within the .pdb file. Unfortunately, that does not appear to work in stanza and I'm posting a bug report there.

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

i use linux, where you can do this somewhat easier. No idea about OS X, I'm afraid. You could just try pointing a browser at the stanza desktop app

Well, I have linux, I just haven't run Calibre on it yet. I learned unix on System V (Solaris), however, not BSD, so I haven't got a lot of experience probing into apps running on linux. Want to toss a few pointers my way?

[kjk]

You can actually click links in Stanza. Some books I have use footnotes that if you click, take you to the footnotes page, then you click another link to go back to where you were.
Links to outside your book go to a built in browser in Stanza...with the option to open it in Safari-but I couldn't get that to work.

The problem is pressing the link correctly, without a) going page forward/back/options, and b) bringing up the annotation screen. You have to press carefully and exactly on the link. Not really optimal.

[kovidgoyal]

On linux there's a program called tcpdump you can use to monitor network traffic. The hard part will be getting stanza to run in linux. Alternatively you can run windows ina virtual machine and listen to all trafiic from that virtual machine.

[nekokami]

Hm. With the semester starting up, I don't think I'm going to have time to pursue this right away. Hopefully someone else will feel like tackling it, because it really would be nice to be able to view a series within Stanza. (Then again, I'd also prefer to be able to view the series books in order, and I'm not so sure the Stanza "collections" work that way.)

[nekokami]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

On linux there's a program called tcpdump you can use to monitor network traffic. The hard part will be getting stanza to run in linux. Alternatively you can run windows ina virtual machine and listen to all trafiic from that virtual machine.

As it turns out, tcpdump is included on OSX, too. If you throw me a few more hints as to what to look for, I should be able to try this later today.

[kovidgoyal]

The way I guess this feature works is that it is in the XML that is sent by stanza to the iPhone. First shutdown all other services/apps that could create network traffic to reduce noise. Then start tcpdump to monitor traffic on your network interface (you can use the ifconfig command to see what that interface is).

Now start the stanza desktop software and connect with your iPhone. You should see lots of XML being transferred in the packets (if you're lucky, I don't remember if stanza does compression of the transmitted XML or not). If it is compressed your life is going to be much harder.

[Yorkiesman]

Calibre2web is working on my website and created a layout which runs perfect from Mozilla but Stanza comes up with the following error when I had the catalog:-

Catalog Error
Error reading catalog data. Please try again later.

I have a removed everything from the library and added 2 simple epub to find the fault the books have standard titles and authors no punctuation.

After testing on another bit of webspace it seems the permissions on my work server are to blame.

What can be the differance I have to make which allows it to work in Stanza when it works perfectly in Firefox.

[jayman]

Originally Posted by kjk

You can actually click links in Stanza. Some books I have use footnotes that if you click, take you to the footnotes page, then you click another link to go back to where you were.
Links to outside your book go to a built in browser in Stanza...with the option to open it in Safari-but I couldn't get that to work.

The problem is pressing the link correctly, without a) going page forward/back/options, and b) bringing up the annotation screen. You have to press carefully and exactly on the link. Not really optimal.

That's not what I'm talking about. I click them correctly. Do me a favor. Download a newspaper using one of the built in recipes on calibre. Transfer it over to your iphone (stanza). Click on the headings and see what you get. I'm telling you it's a bug. I just wish someone would confirm it.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by jayman

That's not what I'm talking about. I click them correctly. Do me a favor. Download a newspaper using one of the built in recipes on calibre. Transfer it over to your iphone (stanza). Click on the headings and see what you get. I'm telling you it's a bug. I just wish someone would confirm it.

Ok, I tried Businessweek. You are right - headings do not work. But other books I have with internal links similarly structured (based on the xhtml code) do work correctly in Stanza. I'm not sure what the difference is, I'm comparing them in Sigil.

My book has footnotes like this:
blah blah blah <a id="f1b" name="f1b"></a> <span class="c6"><a class="plain" href="#ft1">*</a></span> , blah blah.

Clicking on the asterisk sends me to:
<p><a id="ft1" name="ft1"></a></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="c6">*</span> This is a footnote about blah <a href="#f1b">Back</a></p>

The Businessweek links look like this:
<li class="calibre2" id="feed_0"><a class="feed" href="feed_0/index.html">Top Stories</a></li>

clicking Top Stories should go here:
<div class="calibrerescale">
<h2 class="calibrefeedtitle">Top Stories</h2>
<div class="calibrefeeddescription">
Daily Most Popular Stories on BusinessWeek Online<br class="calibre3" /></div>
<ul class="calibrefeedlist">
<li class="calibrerescale1" id="article_0">

We already know Stanza doesn't support a lot of ePub features-there must be something it can't parse in the Businessweek one. But I'm not sure if they will consider it a "bug" or just a "missing feature"

[jayman]

Thanks for looking into it. I sent an email to them and they seem interested. They wanted a rep. sample epub book and to know if it worked in adobe digital editions.

[kjk]

Originally Posted by jayman

Thanks for looking into it. I sent an email to them and they seem interested. They wanted a rep. sample epub book and to know if it worked in adobe digital editions.

Damn, I really hope they provide fuller ePub support. When Stanza first showed up on the scene, it was so great just to have a decent reader on the iPhone. But now I want MORE.