The document opens with symbols

[isarl]

Originally Posted by KIE18

Finally figured out how to upload a screenshot.

According to this screenshot, the characters display fine when rendered as HTML, and are only strange in the source files. Is that accurate? If so then I am very curious about the contents of the stylesheets and in particular the rules governing the class "CharOverride-1". Or perhaps the relevant rule is related to the class in the surrounding div, the classname written in Russian which I will not attempt to type out for myself.

[KevinH]

Good point. Perhaps the CodeView font set in Sigil Preferences simply does not support those characters?

[DiapDealer]

That's very possible. Monospace fonts with full utf-8 coverage can be hard to come by.

[isarl]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Good point. Perhaps the CodeView font set in Sigil Preferences simply does not support those characters?

It seems to me that Sigil handles them fine, and that the document is doing wacky things with stylesheets to transcode characters. Sigil renders it fine as HTML and shows weird characters in source view. So to me it seems that the source file contains UTF-8 encoded characters originally encoded as CP1251 (or some other encoding), which is why we largely see character-for-character matches (compare punctuation, word lengths, etc., for example). When the style rules are applied these incorrectly-encoded characters get re-encoded to the correct encoding and therefore display correctly.

…that's what I think is going on, but without source files to check for myself, I'm just guessing from that singular Sigil screenshot.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by KevinH

Good point. Perhaps the CodeView font set in Sigil Preferences simply does not support those characters?

IMHO, the book most likely contains an embedded CP1251-compatible font. I've created a sample epub that exactly reproduces the OP's problems. (The text is from a Russian Public Domain novel and and the embedded CP1251 font is also in the Public Domain.)

The OP simply needs to convert the HTML files from CP1251 to UTF-8.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

In that case the automatic codepage detection of the converter failed because the original files contained the following declaration:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" standalone="no"?>

As User_Z has already suggested, you could use Notepad++ to fix the encoding:

• Open the file with it (Notepad++ should detect the encoding as Cyrillic > Macintosh or Cyrillic > Win-1251. If it doesn't, select Win-1251.)
• Press CTRL+A to select all text, then press CTRL+C to copy the text to the clipboard.
• Close the original file.
• Select File > New and press CTRL+V to paste the clipboard contents into the new file.
• Save the new file under the same name as the original file.

This'll definitely work, however, since the epub contains multiple files, you might want to search the Russian Internet for batch converters with support for Cyrillic encodings that allow you to manually select in the input and output encodings.

It didn't work. Maybe the file is somehow protected?

[Doitsu]

My recommendation was based on the text in screenshot in post 8. And it'll definitely work for such files, if you follow my instructions. Your screenshot shows this for Глава 1 (= Chapter 1):

Spoiler:

<p [...]>Ãëàâà 1</p>

The same string (with a Roman numeral one) can also be found in my sample CP1251 epub.

After conversion from CP1251 to UTF-8 it'll become:

<p [...]>Глава 1</p>

Since you can't follow simple instructions, this'll be my last reply in this thread.

[KevinH]

I truly think Doitsu is correct. His example shows all of the characteristics of your screenshots and having an embedded Win-1251 font explains why Preview displays correctly while CodeView does not. His solution really should work for you.

Your epub is NOT protected. Just very poorly made without the proper utf-8 text encoding and utf-8 based fonts.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Your book is encoded as WIN-1251, however, epubs need to be encoded as utf-8 or utf-16. You'll need to unzip the epub file and convert all html files to utf-8. The following article might help: Как перекодировать 1251 в UTF-8?

There is an easier solution. Use Calibre with the Modify ePub plugin. There is an option for utf-8. Once that's done, the ePub can be edited in Sigil.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

My recommendation was based on the text in screenshot in post 8. And it'll definitely work for such files, if you follow my instructions. Your screenshot shows this for Глава 1 (= Chapter 1):

Spoiler:

<p [...]>Ãëàâà 1</p>

The same string (with a Roman numeral one) can also be found in my sample CP1251 epub.

After conversion from CP1251 to UTF-8 it'll become:

<p [...]>Глава 1</p>

Since you can't follow simple instructions, this'll be my last reply in this thread.

I didn't understand which file to use. The original epub. Or unpacked and converted in the UTCast Express program. Or the one that I converted in the program, and then changed the zip to epub. These are simple instructions for you. For me it's not that easy. I am new to this. I will try to understand your instructions and try to do it.

[KIE18]

Here is the original file of the book.

[KIE18]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

The same string (with a Roman numeral one) can also be found in my sample CP1251 epub.

I tried on the example of your rus_cp1251.epub file. Opened it in notepad++. Then I chose Win-1251 encoding. I copied everything (CTRL + A, CTRL + C). Closed the document. Created a new one. I pasted what I copied. And this is what happened (screenshot). And it is saved in txt. But I saved with the same epub extension. But the file didn't open at all.
Did I do everything right? If not, please explain more clearly. Maybe there is a video on YouTube that clearly solves this problem.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by KIE18

Here is the original file of the book.

Moderator Notice
Please do not post copyrighted ebooks to MobileRead. There are scrambling plugins that can be used if the structure of entire copyrighted epubs needs to be shared.

[Sarmat89]

Just extract the book as a single HTML file, then convert it to CP1252, then open it as CP1251 and save as UTF-8. There are many editors that can to that, including Notepad++ and VSCode.

[User_Z]

Online converters convert text fragments, but give different source encodings.

If you later paste this fragment into a Sigil, the text is read in both the Code View window and the Preview window. Only in the preview text is displayed without styles.

I think this is because the conversion results in different character codes.
For example:
before conversion, the character "ñ" has the code 241, which corresponds to the letter "c" in СР1251;
after conversion, the character "c" has the code 1089, which corresponds to the letter "c" in UTF-8.

That's just the conversion of СР1251 to UTF-8 gives a deplorable result.