12-01-2012, 12:30 PM | #1 |
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Write .mobi files by hand?
Hi everybody,
So far I've written .epub files myself, with the help of some hand-crafted scripts that digest larger content. That was a good exercise to learn the file format and about eBooks in general. Now I move forward to EPUB3 but that's for another thread. Given the validated .epub file, I have used kindlegen and Calibre to generate a .mobi file, both of which have produced rather poor results for one book or another. So I'm at the point where I'd like to build a .mobi book by hand, look through all the files, structure, and the assembling process that delivers the final eBook. And I'm looking for documentation on this. The wiki here seems to contain a lot, but I haven't found an "easing into" sort of thing. Does anybody have pointers, hints, experiences, etc as to how to go about this? Thanks! Jens |
12-01-2012, 12:38 PM | #2 |
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The wiki is your friend. Use the links to the mobipocket site for documentation on this. You cannot build one directly as it is compiled but you can build a source file and compile it using the mobi compiler called MobiPocket Creator. However, the recommended way is to use ePub and then KindleGen. If you look at the documentation you will notice that pre-KF8 formats from Kindle do not support all the features of ePub so this may be what youi saw in your conversion. You do have to limit the source to what mobi can understand.
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12-06-2012, 07:40 PM | #3 | |||
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Thanks! |
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12-06-2012, 08:22 PM | #4 |
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There should be no problems with a validated ePub (v2) becoming a fully functioning MOBI file using Kindlegen. Whether or not it will look identical to the original ePub in every way is, of course, another story.
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12-06-2012, 08:43 PM | #5 | |
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12-07-2012, 01:01 AM | #6 | |
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Interestingly (and to my great annoyance, considering my dislike of it) Calibre produced a functioning .mobi file. I noticed that the look-alike is a whole different issue, yes I wonder if using Pali characters (UTF8 encoded) would be an issue... Thanks! |
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12-07-2012, 01:18 AM | #7 | |
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I didn't know about the lack of CSS support; I just started to read up on the MOBI format. How is it handled then, by using plain HTML attributes, and styling text with Code:
<i>italic</i> Code:
<span style="font-style:italic;">italic</span> |
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12-08-2012, 09:58 AM | #8 |
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I think you want to use <em></em> and <strong></strong> for italics and for bolds, because <i> and <b> are deprecated.
But I don't know why. I vaguely remember reading something about why, but I forgot. They make more sense to me than <em> and <strong>. |
12-08-2012, 12:15 PM | #9 | |
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12-08-2012, 07:49 PM | #10 |
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Thanks DSpider! I do use <em> quite a bit and style it using CSS, but so far I haven't used <strong> yet. Perhaps I ought to go that way to be able to target both EPUB and MOBI files alike.
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12-08-2012, 07:57 PM | #11 | |
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It's the browser war all over again The other day I played with the Mobipocket Creater but that's too much clicking around for my taste; I'm more of a scripting kinda guy. However, I'm beginning to wonder which way to go: kindlegen or Creator? I assume since Amazon is the target market, it's kindlegen? |
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12-08-2012, 08:05 PM | #12 | |
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(I like these smileys here ) |
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12-08-2012, 11:45 PM | #13 |
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I believe we are supposed to use <em> and <strong> because they are semantic markup, whereas <i> and <b> are presentational. We are supposed to use css to describe how we want things presented, and only have the structure put into the text. It's a matter of purity, although how you present italics or bold in a text to speech transcription is an obvious case in point.
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12-09-2012, 01:12 AM | #14 | |
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12-10-2012, 04:07 PM | #15 | |
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