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Old 12-30-2015, 04:22 PM   #1
bentleymaniac
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Post How to create and layout an ebook
Hi everyone,
I've just started cleaning up several public domain books which have a lot of OCR errors in them. Can anyone tell me the best ways / hacks / tricks to format an ebook?
I prefer using epub, as it is open source. So far I have been using the epubee addon for MS Word, but it doesn't allow a great deal of control over the finished product.
What software should I use, and what coding should I use for the formatting?
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Old 12-30-2015, 05:00 PM   #2
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EPub Tutorial <== Quick and dirty guide to EPUB editing.

And use Toxaris' Word addin for exporting DOCX ==> EPUB.
Or import DOCX directly into the calibre Editor
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Old 12-31-2015, 06:10 AM   #3
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You should learn XHTML and CSS, there's no way around it if you want to be serious (i.e., if you want anything better than a drag-and-drop conversion).

I work on my books with a simple text editor like vim or emacs (no wysiwyg, think of the windows notepad), but you may be more confortable with something like Sigil or the calibre editor.
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Old 12-31-2015, 07:21 AM   #4
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Originally Posted by eschwartz View Post
EPub Tutorial <== Quick and dirty guide to EPUB editing.

And use Toxaris' Word addin for exporting DOCX ==> EPUB.
Or import DOCX directly into the calibre Editor
With my add-in you can correct a lot of OCR errors in a document and you can add your own rules as well.
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Old 12-31-2015, 10:39 AM   #5
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I plan on using a text editor to make Markdown files. And the editor has a macro function where I can search and replace common OCR errors, with me confirming each replace. Then I go and spell check the book, then proof the book by hand.

For the search and replace I use Notetab as it has a programming language built-in. www.notetab.com/download-now.

Once my Markdown files are done I made a program to convert those to EPUB2, called Mkepub.
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Old 12-31-2015, 04:06 PM   #6
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Originally Posted by Toxaris View Post
With my add-in you can correct a lot of OCR errors in a document and you can add your own rules as well.
- Search and Replace, couldn't imagine life without it. OCR will often misread a word as another valid word - 'many' for 'marry' and 'anus' for 'arms' are two that come to mind. The S&R feature enables one to create 'reusable rule sets' that can be used selectively.

The add-on can also check dialogue, using a panoply of different delimiters to suit different styling conventions (US, UK, French, Spanish, German etc). As far as I know this feature is unique to the add-on.

IMO the add-on is worth having even if you don't use its convert to EPUB feature. Especially if you're already proficient in Word.

BR
Last edited by BetterRed; 12-31-2015 at 04:36 PM.
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Old 01-05-2016, 08:24 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed View Post
- Search and Replace, couldn't imagine life without it. OCR will often misread a word as another valid word - 'many' for 'marry' and 'anus' for 'arms' are two that come to mind. The S&R feature enables one to create 'reusable rule sets' that can be used selectively.

The add-on can also check dialogue, using a panoply of different delimiters to suit different styling conventions (US, UK, French, Spanish, German etc). As far as I know this feature is unique to the add-on.

IMO the add-on is worth having even if you don't use its convert to EPUB feature. Especially if you're already proficient in Word.

BR
Hell, if for NOTHING else, the ability to tag common text formatting of bold and italic, remove all other formatting the usual Word way, and lay the bold/italic back down? Priceless.

Hitch
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Old 03-09-2016, 01:51 PM   #8
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You could try the ePub Tidy tool plugin at:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=264378

This was designed to help to tidy up OCR'd ePub files.
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