Gregg's Nearly Interminable Adventures in Linux Land

[Gregg Bell]

All right, thanks for the positive feedback, guys. I am really growing to like Linux and would hate to give it up. It seems though, back in the days when I was using XP, everything, regarding text, was pretty uniform with XP. In Linux I like using LO but often stuff opens in AbiWord in the default. So I've been copying and pasting, just a bit, between LO and AbiWord, and the result has been different text sizes, spaces deleted, and just general instability. But that isn't what the error message was about.

The "some errors were caused during the import" error has actually happened three or four times now and always in AbiWord. The first time the only unusual thing I did was to "select all" to copy a 5 or 6 page list of Linux commands. Then I saved it and everything seemed cool, but when I opened it, the error window opened (and like I said I was missing the last 90% of the text).

Since then, the other "some errors were caused during the import" errors were in AbiWord again, and with the last few error messages, there has been no data loss, but the first page is blank and whatever data there was is shunted to begin on the second page.

All I can think of in terms of anything being unusual in these instances is that I have been using the highlighter feature to highlight blocks of text. (And the highlighter works fine when AbiWord is open, but when I save and re-open for a while the highlighting has been there, but lately it has not. (And I'm talking about re-highlighting, saving and then re-opening.))

Then, getting concerned I might lose data, I "selected all" to copy my AbiWord doc (about 5 or 6 pages) and pasted it into LO, thinking LO might be more stable. But that led to the mess of font size changes and spaces deleted I mentioned in the first paragraph.

Not having had any problems with LO (except the cruft creeping in--described two posts ago--when converting an .odt file to .html in LO) I am thinking of using LO exclusively, but like I said AbiWord opens in the default and sometimes I don't even recognize the difference between it and LO and like I said before I like AbiWord. (It's quick and I like the way it copies stuff, doing the auto-complete thing.)

[eschwartz]

I haven't used AbiWord, and I haven't got a clue why it would do that. However, it seems the problem is with AbiWord???

You can change the default program by right-clicking on any .odt file in the File Browser, and selecting Properties ==> Open With. Select LibreOffice and click on "Set as default"

[cromag]

I have used Abiword when I needed to run Linux on very old hardware. Abiword is a good word processor, but it's designed for systems that have limited resources -- there's no reason (I can think of) for having both Abiword and LibreOffice on the same computer. If you can run LibreOffice without problems I'd uninstall Abiword. (If it turns out you do need to have Abiword too, you can always re-install it -- it's free.)

I've never used highlighting but it's entirely possible that a given feature would be implemented differently with two different applications. You can keep Abiword from opening as eschwartz described, but make sure you hit all the word processing formats you might use, like .doc, .docx, etc.

But, honestly, my first recommendation would be to uninstall Abiword and see if that helps.

[Dngrsone]

I use Libre Office in Linux Mint, which is an off-shoot of Ubuntu. For a while I was converting straight to .pdb since my ebooks were all residing on a Palm OS PDA.

I am gettting a handle on using styles in LO, but a lot of my actual writing goes better, I find, if I do the text portion in a text editor such as gedit and then copy the unformatted text from there into LO for any speicifc formatting.

I wish I could write HTML on-the-fly; I'd probably do the whole thing in gedit and not have to worry about converting stuff, but I am not there yet.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

I haven't used AbiWord, and I haven't got a clue why it would do that. However, it seems the problem is with AbiWord???

You can change the default program by right-clicking on any .odt file in the File Browser, and selecting Properties ==> Open With. Select LibreOffice and click on "Set as default"

Thanks eschwartz. It's got to be Abiword. Abiword is funky. Just in a general sense. I think I like cromag's suggestion to uninstall it.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by cromag

I have used Abiword when I needed to run Linux on very old hardware. Abiword is a good word processor, but it's designed for systems that have limited resources -- there's no reason (I can think of) for having both Abiword and LibreOffice on the same computer. If you can run LibreOffice without problems I'd uninstall Abiword. (If it turns out you do need to have Abiword too, you can always re-install it -- it's free.)

I've never used highlighting but it's entirely possible that a given feature would be implemented differently with two different applications. You can keep Abiword from opening as eschwartz described, but make sure you hit all the word processing formats you might use, like .doc, .docx, etc.

But, honestly, my first recommendation would be to uninstall Abiword and see if that helps.

Uninstalled AbiWord, cromag, but it opened up a hornet's nest. It seems most, if not all, of the documents made in AbiWord will not open in LO. (see 48 screenshot) So I thought I would hang on to AbiWord if I needed it (because I have a couple of docs just loaded with minutiae that would be hell-ish to re-type), and just do eschwartz's thing of setting the default to LO but there was no place to do that (screenshot 49) so I uninstalled AbiWord. Fortunately the one doc I really need opened in LO. I'm going to make a copy of it, and as soon is feasible get rid of it altogether.

I'm a little nervous about LO now because I, coming over from Windows, do have a lot of .doc files. I'm hoping they'll be okay opening in LO and such. We'll see.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by Dngrsone

I use Libre Office in Linux Mint, which is an off-shoot of Ubuntu. For a while I was converting straight to .pdb since my ebooks were all residing on a Palm OS PDA.

I am gettting a handle on using styles in LO, but a lot of my actual writing goes better, I find, if I do the text portion in a text editor such as gedit and then copy the unformatted text from there into LO for any speicifc formatting.

I wish I could write HTML on-the-fly; I'd probably do the whole thing in gedit and not have to worry about converting stuff, but I am not there yet.

Thanks Dngrsone. I'm experimenting with styles in LO too. I'm not thrilled with the results so far and ironically I have just recently found (I haven't done that much testing with it though) that not using the styles is producing less cruft than using them. But like I said I haven't done much testing.

I've tried the composing right on a text editor and discovered there are disadvantages with that too (the unreliability of WYSIWYG text editor and the oddness of looking at all the markup when I composed in "code.").

But hey, we're having fun figuring all this stuff out, aren't we?

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

Uninstalled AbiWord, cromag, but it opened up a hornet's nest. It seems most, if not all, of the documents made in AbiWord will not open in LO. (see 48 screenshot) So I thought I would hang on to AbiWord if I needed it (because I have a couple of docs just loaded with minutiae that would be hell-ish to re-type), and just do eschwartz's thing of setting the default to LO but there was no place to do that (screenshot 49) so I uninstalled AbiWord. Fortunately the one doc I really need opened in LO. I'm going to make a copy of it, and as soon is feasible get rid of it altogether.

According to your screenshot, "Open With" is already defined as LibreOffice Writer. It uses a different view from Ubuntu 12.04, so I have attached a screenshot of how Ubuntu 12.04 shows file Properties. In your screenshot, Open with is not a new tab, it is just a dropdown list that shows the focus on the default.

I'm a little nervous about LO now because I, coming over from Windows, do have a lot of .doc files. I'm hoping they'll be okay opening in LO and such. We'll see.

.doc opens perfectly fine in LibreOffice in my experience.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

According to your screenshot, "Open With" is already defined as LibreOffice Writer. It uses a different view from Ubuntu 12.04, so I have attached a screenshot of how Ubuntu 12.04 shows file Properties. In your screenshot, Open with is not a new tab, it is just a dropdown list that shows the focus on the default.



.doc opens perfectly fine in LibreOffice in my experience.

Thanks eschwartz, I just got rid of AbiWord in both computers. It was a relief. Everything (w/LO) since has been solid. And good to know about docs opening well.

Do me a favor if you would. I was reading one of your old posts about how cruft seeps into any document that doesn't use styles. You were talking about span tags creeping in between every word in some paragraphs. Well, that's exactly what happened to me. (see, if you would, the post in the Gregg's Advnetures thread dated 3/19 7:19am. Ignore the part about flash drives. That flash drive I was asking about was just shot.) The only thing is I was using Styles. (the "text body" style). Curious to see what you have to say about that. Thanks.

[eschwartz]

Perhaps you copy-pasted from elsewhere? Depending on the source it may include the info that the text is normal, thus the extra tag info. Some people use a clipboard scrubber to remove any possible formatting on their copy-pasting.

As long as you are only typing directly, this shouldn't happen.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Perhaps you copy-pasted from elsewhere? Depending on the source it may include the info that the text is normal, thus the extra tag info. Some people use a clipboard scrubber to remove any possible formatting on their copy-pasting.

As long as you are only typing directly, this shouldn't happen.

I was typing directly and in the style. The only variable was the occasional use of italics. That's why it freaked me out.

[Gregg Bell]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Well, if you just need to convert the file, not test out how it looks, then there is good news. As st_albert said, Kindle Previewer is just kindlegen plus a mobi viewer. So just use kindlegen to convert it directly, as the additional usage of the Previewer to see how the files will look on the kindle, is unnecessary within your workflow.

Dual mobi is a .mobi created by kindlegen, which has both KF7 (.mobi) and KF8 (.azw3) formats. Amazon splits it into .mobi files to give old readers, and .azw3 files to give newer readers that support it.
.azw3 is Amazon's update to the MOBI format which gives it support for newer everything, including embedded fonts, since it is essentially an alternative wrapper to EPUB.

---

Download kindlegen from here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1000765211

save it in a folder called "bin" inside your home folder, which is "/home/gregory/".

Any programs located in "/home/gregory/bin/" will be automatically found when you type them in the command line. (After first creating the "bin" folder, you need to log out then in for the folder to be sensed.)

Then to convert a book open the terminal, type in "kindlegen", space, the filename of the document to be converted, and there you go!

Getting a mobi has become my new priority and I tried your instructions and got a bit bogged. The download from Kindlegen is a zip file and when I tried to save it to bin in it's entirety it would not paste. So I was figuring maybe I needed to save the file shown in the screenshot (Kindlegen).

Then I looked at the "read me" of the Kindlegen file and it said to (see next three screenshots) create a file called Kindlegen in Home and I couldn't do that either (see 132).

So I'm doing pretty good so far, dontcha think? (I maneuvered MR successfully anyway.)

Any ideas? Thanks.

[eschwartz]

ignore what amazon said, just unzip the tar.gz zipped folder into downloads (or wherever you downloaded it to) and then enter the unzipped folder and copy the (exectutable) file "kindlegen" into /home/gregory/bin/

They want you to use a special kindlegen folder, but there's no good reason to.

I forgot that kindlegen came in a zipped folder. It's been a little while since I downloaded it, I guess.

[eschwartz]

Also, when they said create in the home folder, they meant your user folder "/home/gregory/". The literal "home" folder is like "C:\Users\" or "C:\Documents and Settings\" on Windows; it contains each user's home folder, hence the name.

[Gregg Bell]

Thanks eschwartz but bogged again. This (see 001) is the only way I know to access the bin folder. And when I tried to copy and paste the Kindlegen file it wouldn't paste (into bin, that is).

And 002 shows what home/gregory/ looks like (in that there's no bin folder there.)

On the positive side I was able to extract the zip file into the Downloads folder.