Various Conversion Questions

[Red Penguin]

First of all thanks to kovidgoyal for Calibre, =X= for BookCreator and anyone in this folder who posted guides on PDF -> anything else.

I've been converting a few things from PDFs to LRFs for use on my PRS-505 using mainly the process

Scansoft PDF Converter -> Microsoft Word -> BookCreater -> RTF -> Calbre

After tinkering around a bit I've got the PDF to Word bit working alright, but the last 2 steps, while giving good results, I'm having some problems with. I figured I throw the BookCreator questions in here rather than post in the Sticky.

BookCreator: I want to modify the styles slightly (I don't want chapter headings capitalised or Centralised for one). Looking at the options in the styles Box, it seems the way to do this is to change 'Style Based on' from heading 1 to something not capitalised and centralised. Would this mess up the 'Create TOC' or calibre's chapter detection? I could tidy this up manually of course, but for longer books it could take hours.

RTFs: Whenever I use calibre to convert RTFs to LRFs, although the chapters usually work fine, the formatting goes out the window. I use as my base for comparision the 'Sherlock Holmes Omnibus' in the EBooks section, which is beautifully presented. Anything I've centralised, any spaces or page breaks I've put in all disappear. I'm guessing this might be one of the limits of the RTF format. Will changing format e.g. to HTML allow me to layout my books better?

This leads me onto my final (promise) question

HTML: So I try saving the word document (post BookCreatorored) as an filtered HTML, but looking at the source and going off what people have said it is too 'untidy'. I've seen a couple of suggestions, including tidy.sourceforge but it looks pretty complicated and I don't have the first idea how to use it. Is there a tutorial that explains how to use it and get the minimum tags? Will this fix my layout problem?

Thanks

JM

[kovidgoyal]

html->lrf is generally superior to rtf->lrf in calibre

[=X=]

Originally Posted by Red Penguin

BookCreator: I want to modify the styles slightly (I don't want chapter headings capitalised or Centralised for one). Looking at the options in the styles Box, it seems the way to do this is to change 'Style Based on' from heading 1 to something not capitalised and centralised. Would this mess up the 'Create TOC' or calibre's chapter detection? I could tidy this up manually of course, but for longer books it could take hours.

RTFs: <snip...>

HTML: So I try saving the word document (post BookCreatorored)

JM

Hi JM,
A1: Yes it is very easy to change styles on BookCreator.dot. All you have to do is right click on the "_2 CHAPTER TITLE" style and select the "Modify..." menu option. There you can change the style to your liking.
Note: you will have to save the template if you want this changes to stick else it will be a per document change.

A2: Unless your final target is RTF I would not use this format as an intermediate. The sony reader does handle RTF just fine, as long as you don't want TOC or images. Else I would look into HTML or LIT.

A3: I've tested Filtered HTML and MS HTML. Calibre handles both just fine. However MS HTML retains all of the formatting one sets in the MS Word document. My recommendation is just to export MS HTML and convert it with Calibre. (Most people who complain about the MS HTML tags, including myself, are usually folks that plan on maintaining the source. If this is not your intent then do not worry about the extra tags generated)


Final comment. Microsoft has a free MSWord plugin named WordRMR that converts MSWord docs to LIT. Since Calibre does a fantastic job converting LIT -> LRF you might want to look at that as a solution.

[Red Penguin]

Cheers =X=, 'specially for the wordRMR tip

*converts, furiously*