[GUI Plugin] EpubMerge

[JimmXinu]

New Version Released

Version 2.17.0 - 2023-11-29
- Update Translations

[Wandering Cloud]

Hey man, love the plugin. Do you take feature requests?

If so, I was wondering if you could create settings to:

*Put a chapterlist at the start of the merged epub of all the books merged, for easy reference.
I know can do this manually currently if you edit the epub, but with 15+ epub's merged together it takes a while to do.

*Annotate the chapter headings so instead of being (chapter), they're ((book title)chapter)).
I'm sure that this can be done somehow, because my kindle knows the correct chapter title to display whenever I activate the UI while reading. But I've no idea how to edit this in calibre.

[JimmXinu]

Not very much anymore.

As for your specific requests:

You can use Calibre's Convert epub->epub or Edit book (under Tools) to inject an in-line ToC. And if you're converting to AZW3 for Kindle, the ToC at the end of the book.

EpubMerge doesn't actually look inside the book contents at all, it only reads/writes the metadata. And nothing says chapter headings inside have to match what the ToC says, or have any consistent formatting to find. So annotating chapter headings is non-trivial.

[Wandering Cloud]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Not very much anymore.

As for your specific requests:

You can use Calibre's Convert epub->epub or Edit book (under Tools) to inject an in-line ToC. And if you're converting to AZW3 for Kindle, the ToC at the end of the book.

EpubMerge doesn't actually look inside the book contents at all, it only reads/writes the metadata. And nothing says chapter headings inside have to match what the ToC says, or have any consistent formatting to find. So annotating chapter headings is non-trivial.

Ah, thanks for the reply.

[tatteredscroll]

Does the CLI expect simple filenames for merge? In other words, for multiple files, is it expecting something like--

$ calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge file1.epub file2.epub book9.epub

I've got a directory with several epubs and with some fairly typical ebook names (by that I mean they are quite varied), as an example--

My ebook of all the planets_ John Smith.epub
How to make a souffle(part I) _ Web Recipes.epub
The Christmas Tree Story, Nothing Artificial.epub

I've tried many ways to get these oddly named files formatted so EpubMerge can handle, but I've hit a point where I'm not sure exactly sure what it's expecting.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by tatteredscroll

Does the CLI expect simple filenames for merge? In other words, for multiple files, is it expecting something like--

$ calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge file1.epub file2.epub book9.epub

EpubMerge itself doesn't have any particular expectations about file names.

Unless it's just an oversight that you forgot to include in your post, I suspect you need the '--' after '--run-plugin EpubMerge' that tells calibre-debug's option parser to stop and pass everything after that to EpubMerge.

From first post:

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Usage: calibre-debug.exe --run-plugin EpubMerge -- [options] <input epub> [<input epub>...]

Given list of epubs will be merged together into one new epub.

Options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -o OUTPUT, --output=OUTPUT
                        Set OUTPUT file, Default: merge.epub
  -t TITLE, --title=TITLE
                        Use TITLE as the metadata title.  Default: '<first
                        epub title> Anthology'
  -d DESC, --description=DESC
                        Use DESC as the metadata description.  Default: '<epub
                        title> by <author>' for each epub.
  -a AUTHOR, --author=AUTHOR
                        Use AUTHOR as a metadata author, multiple authors may
                        be given, Default: <All authors from epubs>
  -g TAG, --tag=TAG     Include TAG as dc:subject tag, multiple tags may be
                        given, Default: None
  -l LANG, --language=LANG
                        Include LANG as dc:language tag, multiple languages
                        may be given, Default: en
  -n, --no-titles-in-toc
                        Default is to put an entry in the TOC for each epub,
                        nesting each epub's chapters under it.
  -N, --no-original-toc
                        Default is to include the TOC from each original epub.
  -f, --flatten-toc     Flatten TOC down to one level only.
  -c COVER, --cover=COVER
                        Path to a jpg to use as cover image.
  -k, --keep-meta       Keep original metadata files in merged epub.  Use for
                        UnMerging.
  -s URL, --source=URL  Include URL as dc:source and
                        dc:identifier(opf:scheme=URL).
  -u, --unmerge         UnMerge an existing epub that was created by merging
                        with --keep-meta.
  -D OUTPUTDIR, --outputdir=OUTPUTDIR
                        Set output directory for unmerge, Default: (current
                        dir)

[tatteredscroll]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

EpubMerge itself doesn't have any particular expectations about file names.

Unless it's just an oversight that you forgot to include in your post, I suspect you need the '--' after '--run-plugin EpubMerge' that tells calibre-debug's option parser to stop and pass everything after that to EpubMerge.

From first post:

Ok, I missed that , let me give it another go.

UPDATE: that did the trick. On Linux, to get it to read the full list of filenames in-line and separate, I did this for anyone who cares or might stumble on this in the future

Built file list with
find ~/Documents/mergeTest/ -type f | sed 's/ /\\ /g' | tr '\n' ' ' > epubs-list2

Then ran EpubMerge from calibre-debug CLI
cat epubs-list2 | xargs calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge --

This produced the default merge.epub file.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by tatteredscroll

UPDATE: that did the trick. On Linux, to get it to read the full list of filenames in-line and separate, I did this for anyone who cares or might stumble on this in the future

Glad you got it working.

FYI, you can save several steps like so:

find ~/Documents/mergeTest/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge --

[tatteredscroll]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Glad you got it working.

FYI, you can save several steps like so:

find ~/Documents/mergeTest/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge --

Thanks for the tip!

[jnote]

Originally Posted by tatteredscroll

Thanks for the tip!

thanks for the tip~~

and gpt4 create this windows batch file, it works well
(assuming that 'calibre-debug' is included in your windows path)


@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set FILES=
for %%f in ("C:\your_path\*.epub") do (
set FILES=!FILES! "%%f"
)

calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge -- %FILES%

[jnote]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Glad you got it working.

FYI, you can save several steps like so:

find ~/Documents/mergeTest/ -type f -print0 | xargs -0 calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge --

thanks for the tip

and gpt4 create this batch file, it works well
(assuming that calibre-debug included in your windows path)

@echo off
setlocal enabledelayedexpansion

set FILES=
for %%f in ("C:\your_path\*.epub") do (
    set FILES=!FILES! "%%f"
)

calibre-debug --run-plugin EpubMerge -- %FILES%

[JimmXinu]

New Test Version

2024-02-11
- Update Translations
- Decrypt encrypted/obfuscated font files.

Recently, it's come up in the EpubSplit thread that encrypted font files weren't being handled gracefully.

It turns out Calibre Convert has been 'preserving font encryption' for nearly 15 years.

This version of EpubMerge decrypts the font files, but it doesn't make any attempt to re-encrypt them again in the merged epub. I just don't see the point.

There are, in fact, two different 'encryptions' used, according to the Calibre code. I've carried over the implementation for both, but I only have one to test with. FYI.

[JimmXinu]

New Version Released

Version 2.18.0 - 2024-04-01
- Update Translations
- Decrypt encrypted/obfuscated font files
- Save opf:file-as attr from author tags in CLI #13
- Actually have 'en' default for `-l` in CLI.