time machine?

[armchair]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

Hello Armchair! We do have a time machine, but Marc (montsnmags) set it up all wrong and now all it does is suck time away from normal activities and forces us to stay here in MobileRead.

Which is not all that bad a thing, though...

did you hear about the guy who developed a time machine that worked perfectly, except - it could only go back in time by 4 seconds?

did you hear about the guy who developed a time machine that worked perfectly, except - it could only go back in time by 4 seconds?

did you hear about the guy who developed a time machine that worked perfectly, except - it could only go back in time by 4 seconds?.. (etc)

[armchair]

Originally Posted by Sweetpea

Why would you use the sony software?

*looks at Z's devices: ebookwise 1150.*

Nope, no Sony there...



Except when it keeps you from reading!

Welcome, Armchair! I would try to add some cat hair to your device. It might work (knowing that cats are magical beings...)

I have enough trouble keeping our cat off my favourite chair (sorry, HIS favourite chair). And god knows I've tried keeping his cat-hair out of everything in the lab. Not that I have a lab, just, you know, IF I had a lab..

[armchair]

Originally Posted by Mike L

Hello Armchair,

Always good to welcome a fellow Scot (naturalised, in my case).

There's been some sporadic suggestions for a meet-up at the Edinburgh Book Festival this summer. I don't know if it will happen, but look out for more info.

I used to sell books at the Edinburgh Festival - I mean actual paper-type books (what are we calling those things nowadays?)

[Sweetpea]

Originally Posted by armchair

I used to sell books at the Edinburgh Festival - I mean actual paper-type books (what are we calling those things nowadays?)

p-books... Makes sense

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by armchair

Thanks. I have some books in pdf which I am converting using Calibre. Would you recommend going to epub or lrf format? Some of my files seem to end up with egregious line-breaks etc whichever I use, so maybe I'm not ticking the right boxes in the conversion settings, or else the original pdfs are screwed up somehow.. Any tips?

Oh, and yeah I found the freebies ok..

personally i am all for the epub format. it's an open standard format and much more future-proof than lrf. egregious line-breaks are probably due to hard carriage returns in the source file and can be edited out, if you want. an epub file is just html inside a zip wrapper. take a look around the workshop and epub forums for some useful tips on how to do that.

Originally Posted by armchair

I have enough trouble keeping our cat off my favourite chair (sorry, HIS favourite chair). And god knows I've tried keeping his cat-hair out of everything in the lab. Not that I have a lab, just, you know, IF I had a lab..

of course. i would have the same problem, if i had a lab. not that i have one, mind you.

as for my favorite chair (sorry, i mean the cat's favorite chair...) usually i have to share.

[armchair]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

personally i am all for the epub format. it's an open standard format and much more future-proof than lrf. egregious line-breaks are probably due to hard carriage returns in the source file and can be edited out, if you want. an epub file is just html inside a zip wrapper. take a look around the workshop and epub forums for some useful tips on how to do that.


of course. i would have the same problem, if i had a lab. not that i have one, mind you.

as for my favorite chair (sorry, i mean the cat's favorite chair...) usually i have to share.

Thanks, so epub it is then. I dimly grasp but didn't really understand your comments about editing out hard carriage returns etc - sounds a bit techie for my level.. I just want to read stuff, not grapple with technical editing issues if I can avoid it. If I've got dozens of ebooks with messy-looking formatting (which I have), it would probably be a big project to tidy them up. But let me be more specific: using Calibre for converting file formats, if you go to the Set Conversion Defaults tab /"Look and Feel" - there are options to tick eg Remove spacing between paras, no text justification, etc - which settings do I want?? And in "Chapter Detection" - do I want to "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents"?? Yeesh..

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by armchair

Thanks, so epub it is then. I dimly grasp but didn't really understand your comments about editing out hard carriage returns etc - sounds a bit techie for my level.. I just want to read stuff, not grapple with technical editing issues if I can avoid it. If I've got dozens of ebooks with messy-looking formatting (which I have), it would probably be a big project to tidy them up. But let me be more specific: using Calibre for converting file formats, if you go to the Set Conversion Defaults tab /"Look and Feel" - there are options to tick eg Remove spacing between paras, no text justification, etc - which settings do I want?? And in "Chapter Detection" - do I want to "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents"?? Yeesh..

hm, well, editing out the hard carriage returns can be time-consuming but it is possible. take a look at this thread to start, i think it sounds like the same problem as you have.

as for the calibre questions, first a little tip, if you hover over the options a short explanation will be displayed at the bottom of the dialogue box. and if you get stuck, you might take a look in the calibre forum to see whether you find an answer there, if not you can start a new thread. kovid is very active here and there are a lot of people who know very well how everything works.

some of the options depend on your personal taste :
"remove spacing between paras" : if ticked, it will remove the empty line between paragraphs.

"no text justification" justifed text means text which has a "straight" margin on both sides. it forces each line to be the same length. personally i dislike automatic justification because (particularly with a larger font size) it will result in irregular spaces and sometimes "rivers" where there will be a large space in about the same place on several lines down the page, which i find really ugly. but a lot of people strongly prefer justified text. note that currently, the epub rendering motor used on the sonys cannot handle justification, so even if you specify that the text will be displayed left-aligned. but since adobe has already added this function presumably sony can add it through a firmware update, and other models probably will have it as well.

as for the "force use of the auto-generated toc", it will create a new table of contents based on the chapters it detects. if there already is a table of contents you may not need to tick this. i don't know much about that option, so at worst you could ask in the calibre forum.

it can be a lot of work to format all your books, i recommend you do them little by little so you don't feel ovewhelmed ! particularly if they all need specific attention. but it is a great feeling to read a really nicely displayed ebook !

[armchair]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

hm, well, editing out the hard carriage returns can be time-consuming but it is possible. take a look at this thread to start, i think it sounds like the same problem as you have.

as for the calibre questions, first a little tip, if you hover over the options a short explanation will be displayed at the bottom of the dialogue box. and if you get stuck, you might take a look in the calibre forum to see whether you find an answer there, if not you can start a new thread. kovid is very active here and there are a lot of people who know very well how everything works.

some of the options depend on your personal taste :
"remove spacing between paras" : if ticked, it will remove the empty line between paragraphs.

"no text justification" justifed text means text which has a "straight" margin on both sides. it forces each line to be the same length. personally i dislike automatic justification because (particularly with a larger font size) it will result in irregular spaces and sometimes "rivers" where there will be a large space in about the same place on several lines down the page, which i find really ugly. but a lot of people strongly prefer justified text. note that currently, the epub rendering motor used on the sonys cannot handle justification, so even if you specify that the text will be displayed left-aligned. but since adobe has already added this function presumably sony can add it through a firmware update, and other models probably will have it as well.

as for the "force use of the auto-generated toc", it will create a new table of contents based on the chapters it detects. if there already is a table of contents you may not need to tick this. i don't know much about that option, so at worst you could ask in the calibre forum.

it can be a lot of work to format all your books, i recommend you do them little by little so you don't feel ovewhelmed ! particularly if they all need specific attention. but it is a great feeling to read a really nicely displayed ebook !

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply in some detail. Looks like ticking the "No text justification" option is what I want - even if the eReader can't handle it! I was hoping there would be an optimal default set of options that would produce perfectly formatted epubs for all pdfs, but unfortunately it looks as if this is not available.
Eg I notice that some of my epubs (converted from pdf) have (pointlessly and annoyingly) inserted the title of the book every few pages of text!

I will check out the forum you recommended, anyway. Thanks again.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by armchair

Thanks for taking the trouble to reply in some detail. Looks like ticking the "No text justification" option is what I want - even if the eReader can't handle it!

hm, just to be clear, the reader can't handle justified text, which is what you get if you *don't* tick the box. ade can display that on your pc, but on the reader it will display left aligned (like the text of this post). however i expect justification will be coming soon (speculation, but since adobe added it in the latest ade it seems likely).

I was hoping there would be an optimal default set of options that would produce perfectly formatted epubs for all pdfs, but unfortunately it looks as if this is not available.

where's the fun in that ?

(although i do tend to use the same settings for all my books ; so once you define them to your liking, you don't necessarily have to do it again).

Eg I notice that some of my epubs (converted from pdf) have (pointlessly and annoyingly) inserted the title of the book every few pages of text!

that is a problem of conversion from pdf ; those are actually the page headers, which sometimes get translated as part of the text. i agree, incredibly annoying. if they are all the same though, they are easy to get rid of with a simple search (for header text) and replace (with nothing). page numbers are usually trickier, but you can automate those too particularly if there is a footer text (that makes it easier to find them).

I will check out the forum you recommended, anyway. Thanks again.

no worries ; glad to help.

[armchair]

Eg I notice that some of my epubs (converted from pdf) have (pointlessly and annoyingly) inserted the title of the book every few pages of text!

that is a problem of conversion from pdf ; those are actually the page headers, which sometimes get translated as part of the text. i agree, incredibly annoying. if they are all the same though, they are easy to get rid of with a simple search (for header text) and replace (with nothing). page numbers are usually trickier, but you can automate those too particularly if there is a footer text (that makes it easier to find them).

This search and replace operation of which you speak - do you do this in the pdf (opening it presumably with Adobe) before loading it into Calibre? (no option to do it within Calibre that I can see..

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by pshrynk

Hello Armchair! We do have a time machine, but Marc (montsnmags) set it up all wrong and now all it does is suck time away from normal activities and forces us to stay here in MobileRead.

Which is not all that bad a thing, though...

~ahem~ Define "wrong", in at least 500,000 words, chugging a schooner of ZCD between each chapter, and in the meantime I'll keep calibrating for absolute uncertainty. If this is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Cheers,
Marc (currently counting how many holes, black or white, it takes to fill the Albert Hall)

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by armchair

This search and replace operation of which you speak - do you do this in the pdf (opening it presumably with Adobe) before loading it into Calibre? (no option to do it within Calibre that I can see..

no, you must first convert the pdf to an editable format (html, doc, txt...). then you can do search and replace in whatever app you use for editing text (dreamweaver, word, open office, etc.).

Originally Posted by montsnmags

~ahem~ Define "wrong", in at least 500,000 words, chugging a schooner of ZCD between each chapter, and in the meantime I'll keep calibrating for absolute uncertainty. If this is wrong, then I don't want to be right.

Cheers,
Marc (currently counting how many holes, black or white, it takes to fill the Albert Hall)

you let us know how many it is !

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by zelda_pinwheel

...
you let us know how many it is !

It turns out it's eleventy. Shocking, I know and I'm surprised The Beatles didn't mention that important detail.

Cheers,
Marc

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by montsnmags

It turns out it's eleventy. Shocking, I know and I'm surprised The Beatles didn't mention that important detail.

Cheers,
Marc

i know ! you'd think a group of their calibre would have included such vital information.

[montsnmags]

"Number 9" was a red herring perhaps?