[GUI Plugin] FanFictionDownLoader

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by PandathePanda

Had a look at my anthology updated from this morning, during lunch. Seems something went horribly wrong.

Sigil only sees three pages, opening the epub with 7z shows that everything is there.

Uploaded it here: tempsend.com/305ED3D9F2(its a 7z file remove the zip part of the name)

Don't try to use Sigil on Anthology (or more generally, EpubMerge'd) books.

Sigil doesn't handle the nested dir structure inside the epub correctly. This is a known problem with Sigil that they had elected to not fix the last I checked. The structure we use is valid by the epub standard.

So if you saved it with Sigil, there's no point looking in your posted file--Sigil will have corrupted it. (Even if I did have a 7z tool handy. FYI, you don't need to compress an epub file--it's already zipped.)

Second, I'm able to download that series as an anthology and it looks fine in Calibre's reader and on my Nook.

Only semi-related, the animated images in those stories are somewhat messed up by the usual image conversion and resizing. Adding the code below to your personal.ini will prevent that at the cost of larger image files in the epub:

[archiveofourown.org:epub]
# an AO3 series (http://archiveofourown.org/series/150066) has animated images 
no_image_processing: true

[Tanjamuse]

BetterRed mentioned something to me about Raw_metadata, how would that work for keeping the metadata in the downloaded order, instead of changing it to alphabetically, if I change anything?

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Tanjamuse

BetterRed mentioned something to me about Raw_metadata, how would that work for keeping the metadata in the downloaded order, instead of changing it to alphabetically, if I change anything?

Without more context, I don't know, sorry.

[Tanjamuse]

When I edit my Characters-metadata, it always reverts back to being alphabetically sorted instead of keep_in_order_characters:true. BetterRed mentioned this:

program:sublist(raw_field(‘#characters’), 1, 2, ‘,’)

But I'm unsure of how to make it happen.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Tanjamuse

When I edit my Characters-metadata, it always reverts back to being alphabetically sorted instead of keep_in_order_characters:true. BetterRed mentioned this:

But I'm unsure of how to make it happen.

You have to keep in mind that there are two different systems involved.

The keep_in_order_characters:true is a parameter in FFDL's personal.ini and effects how FFDL treats the metadata. The best way to see if FFDL is re-ordering your characters is to look at the characters line on the title page inside the epub.

If they are alphabetized there when you don't want them to be, I might be able to help with that.

Whether Calibre alphabetizes the characters after set by FFDL is a separate matter.

I suspect that BetterRed was suggesting using that code snippet to effect how Calibre is displaying your characters, possibly as a second display-only custom column. I don't know that part of Calibre well enough to comment off hand. But it's after FFDL has finished with the data.

(Note that as you've quoted it you have 'smart' quotes: (‘,’ vs ',') I don't think those work in actual code.)

[Tanjamuse]

Thanks, I'll try to input this in my custom column and see if it makes a difference. I just didn't understand the raw_metadata-thing

I now get the following (see the Main Character and Secondary Character):

[thatblondelady]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

(Thanks, thatblondelady! )

I've spent most of the day updating the wiki documents for FanFicFare, especially the FAQs page, if anyone's willing to review them.

I'm looking more for things that need fixing than things to add right now.

Anyone with a GitHub account is able to update the wiki pages. I'm hoping in future that the user community will help out with documenting the questions and solutions we discuss.

I'm proofing the page now. Minor thing ... the current version of Sigil DOES have problems with some anthologies, particularly ones from whofic.com, as does Marvin. They display fine on iBooks though.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by thatblondelady

I'm proofing the page now. Minor thing ... the current version of Sigil DOES have problems with some anthologies, particularly ones from whofic.com, as does Marvin. They display fine on iBooks though.

Hmmm. I don't really know anything about Marvin--that concerns me, though.

I was already working on adding a specific FAQ about Sigil, I just haven't put it up yet. Thanks for the update on Sigil.

Why can't I use Sigil to edit Anthology EPUBs?

FanFicFare essentially downloads each story separately and uses the
EpubMerge plugin to merge them together. On Anthology update, it
splits the stories back out again, updates each, and merges them
again.

EpubMerge, in order to touch the contents of each merged book as
little as possible, stores each in a separate directory inside the
EPUB zip file. This is perfectly valid by the EPUB standard.

[Sigil] makes the assumption that all files in the EPUB zip are
uniquely named, and that the directory structure can be flattened
without harm. This is not true of EpubMerged EPUBs (and therefore
FanFicFare Anthologies).

This was reported to the Sigil team in 2013; they elected not to fix
it as it would require too many changes to the way Sigil works.

As of Apr 2015, there are reports that the problem persists, but I
haven't tested it for myself.

[thatblondelady]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

Hmmm. I don't really know anything about Marvin--that concerns me, though.

I was already working on adding a specific FAQ about Sigil, I just haven't put it up yet. Thanks for the update on Sigil.

I think the story I was thinking of was some sort of special case. It was a couple of months ago, but my vague memory was that an image in one of the stories created a screwed up DIV that caused all sorts of formatting problems. I tried to correct it with sigil and it broke the heck out of everything.

Also, I have a specific story on AO3 that has all sorts of weird problems with its TOC when I use the anthology creator and Marvin. I'm not sure how much that problem actually happens because I don't actually use anthologies all that heavily.

I personally ended up just ragequitting Marvin entirely, especially since iOS 8.3 no longer plays nice with the iOS Reader Application plugin. I wasn't especially thrilled with its UI anyway. If you are interested, I can try to reproduce the issues I was having before with links and etc and provide them to you.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by thatblondelady

...
If you are interested, I can try to reproduce the issues I was having before with links and etc and provide them to you.

If those problems only happened on specific stories, I'm inclined to blame the author's HTML. I'd be curious to know the story/series URLs, but not if it's work to find them.

OTOH, if those problems occur more regularly, I'd very much like to know where they happen, thanks.

[thatblondelady]

It's not a problem to get them at all. I only have 5 anthologies, because I don't heavily use them, and I know exactly which ones they are. I'll do a writeup on em for you later. You are basically doing me a favour because now I have another reason to avoid the load of laundry I really don't want to do.

Edit: the bit about how sigil breaks the epubs is exactly the behaviour I got while trying to fix the book. I had chapters out of order, and content missing, which is consistent with what you said about flattening of the folders.

[fathertyme]

It's early but It looks like storiesonline.net has changed something again.

Status: Error
Title: Second Chance
Author: Number 7
Comment: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'find'
URL: http://storiesonline.net/s/764540

It's possible this is on my end, but I hit this with 5 separate urls with the exact same results. I'll keep trying, but 9 times out of 10, they changed something

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by fathertyme

It's early but It looks like storiesonline.net has changed something again.


It's possible this is on my end, but I hit this with 5 separate urls with the exact same results. I'll keep trying, but 9 times out of 10, they changed something

Unless JimmXinu gets bored in the meantime, I'll have a look at this tonight. There's probably been a change but it is usually something simple and obvious.

[JimmXinu]

http://storiesonline.net/s/764540 comes up:

Story Not Found!
It may have been deleted or never existed on the site!

But picking one from the most recent list shows the problem. They changed a div tag to an article tag.

Test version of FanFicFare with fix posted in the new FanFicFare thread.

It's fine to continue reporting problems here for the time being--FanFicFare hasn't been added to the official plugin list yet.

[fathertyme]

I went ahead and installed FFF (updated by JimmyXinu) and that fixed the problem immediately.

should I uninstall FFDL now that FFF is installed?