MobiPerl is making me CrAzY!

[bonzodog]

To All,

I am going CrAzY trying to get MobiPerl working on my iMac (OS X 10.6.4). I've downloaded the latest MobiPerl version (0.0.5) and unzipped it to my machine. I then tried to run mobi2html and of course, I got problems associated with CPAN. Okay, scour the web, figure out and resolve that problem.

Try to run again ... now start getting PM errors: (example) "XML::Parser::Lite::Tree.pm" not found. Go to the internet, find the file, fix it, get another not found ...

Fix that, get another not found .... ad nasaum ...

Try to DL the Chemistry pm's and install that - fails .. Finally give up with mobi2html because this is getting ridiculous and I really don't care about that particular utility - plan on using html2mobi ...

Now when I run html2mobi, it seems to overwrite html2mobi and I start getting "html2mobi: line 2: package: not found" (line 2 is "package GD::Image;"), "html2mobi: line 4: use: not found" (line 4 is "use strict;") and more errors ...

I have spent over 5 hours on this and it still doesn't work. I want to create some ebooks, not become and expert on Perl ....

Any thoughts on how to get this installed? Are there detailed instructions for the MobiPerl/Perl newbie? (doesn't assume I'm a perl expert). Is there a DL somewhere that has the COMPLETE package? Kindofa Load and Go?


TIA,

BD

[AnemicOak]

Doesn't Calibre still include mobi2oeb? any reason not to use that to get your HTML?

[ATDrake]

All the Mobi2Mobi utils are dependent on having the necessary CPAN and other prereqs installed. So you can't really skip installing one and expect anything to work. Except for maybe ConvertLIT if you don't need that.

There is a wiki entry on how to install Mobi2Mobi for Mac, but if it's not helping you so far, then I'm afraid I don't know what else to suggest.

One very important thing to note is that you have to keep all the stuff in the MobiPerl and Palm folders in the same place, with the same structure, as where you end up moving mobi2html, etc. to eventually.

E.g.:
mobils
MobiPerl/Config.pm
opf2mobi
Palm/Doc.pm

Otherwise the lot will fail to work.

If you're just generating Mobi files, you might want to look into Amazon's KindleGen. Although it requires an Intel Mac and version 1.1 currently has a nasty bug where it apparently appends a copy of all your files to the end of the generated file, bloating it up horribly.

But I expect they'll fix that eventually.

[bonzodog]

Thanks for the responses ...

As usual, 15 minutes after submitting this post, I figured out the issues and got it up and running ... Now I just have to figure out how to use the html2mobi code ...

Thanks again,

BD

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

If you're just generating Mobi files, you might want to look into Amazon's KindleGen. Although it requires an Intel Mac and version 1.1 currently has a nasty bug where it apparently appends a copy of all your files to the end of the generated file, bloating it up horribly.

But I expect they'll fix that eventually.

I highly recommend using Kindlegen. And if you're on a Mac, I have a nice AppleScript to turn it into a drag&drop operation. And I've just finished another python script and AppleScript that will strip out the bloated source files from the generated book.

Unfortunately it seem that the appending of the source files is not an oversight or a mistake, as they even issued an update to remove the (undocumented) switch that turned off that 'feature'.

See this thread and this thread.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

Unfortunately it seem that the appending of the source files is not an oversight or a mistake, as they even issued an update to remove the (undocumented) switch that turned off that 'feature'.

Yes, I know. I mentioned it to you in this post here.

But it's good to know someone's created a bloat-stripper. Thanks, it's much appreciated.

Maybe if all the Kindlegen users got together and sent feedback email to them regarding this and the "out of sight, out of mind" nested navpoints issues, Amazon would actually make it a more useful, customizable tool.

Or maybe not, if the goal is to deduct the maximum in filesize/transfer fees from the royalties they pay out.