Converting cyrillic files to epub, best practices?

[Fking]

I've got bunch of doc, pdf, txt files in cyrillic which i want to convert to epub and enjoy on my nexus one with Aldiko reader.

I tried converting them by using cp1251 and UTF-8 for the character encoding field in Calibre, but they always open unreadable in Aldiko.

So, from here i don't have idea what to do. What would be to best practice to convert all kinds of cyrillic files into epub and read them normally?

[Fking]

I'm trying all kinds of options and still can't make it work

[itimpi]

One thing I am not sure of is what fonts are required on the reading device to support Cyrillic eBooks? It is possible to embed fonts in an ePub file, but at the moment this has to be done manually as there is no automated calibre support for embedding fonts (although it is on the roadmap I believe).

[Fking]

Hm, i'm not really familiar with that, can you tell me how to do it? Processing the books 1 by 1 would still be good for a start

[Agnessa]

Same problem Can't process russian files at all, even 1 by 1.

[kiklop74]

Originally Posted by Fking

I've got bunch of doc, pdf, txt files in cyrillic which i want to convert to epub and enjoy on my nexus one with Aldiko reader.

I tried converting them by using cp1251 and UTF-8 for the character encoding field in Calibre, but they always open unreadable in Aldiko.

So, from here i don't have idea what to do. What would be to best practice to convert all kinds of cyrillic files into epub and read them normally?

Most of the e-book readers do not support Cyrillic letters. Therefore in order to properly render those texts in EPUB format you need to embed fonts that do support that.

To do this correctly you must previously prepare your text. The best results are accomplished with utf-8 HTML. So here are the steps:

1. Convert your source text into utf-8 encoded HTML
2. Make sure HTML file has appropriate meta tag for charset

<META HTTP-EQUIV="CONTENT-TYPE" CONTENT="text/html; charset=utf-8">

3. Download Liberation font pack from here https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/ and unpack them in the same folder with HTML file
4. Add this to the head section of your HTML file:

<style type="text/css">
@font-face { font-family: "Liberation Serif";
font-style: normal;
font-weight: normal;
src: url(LiberationSerif-Regular.ttf)
}
@font-face { font-family: "Liberation Serif";
font-style: normal;
font-weight: bold;
src: url(LiberationSerif-Bold.ttf)
}
@font-face { font-family: "Liberation Serif";
font-style: italic;
font-weight: normal;
src: url(LiberationSerif-Italic.ttf)
}
@font-face { font-family: "Liberation Serif";
font-style: italic;
font-weight: bold;
src: url(LiberationSerif-BoldItalic.ttf)
}
body {font-family: "Liberation Serif",serif}
</style>

5. Now you can import that file into calibre and convert it to epub. If you did everything right - you will be able to read russian texts.

Simmilar thing was explained here

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=84256

[discens]

Reading the previous post made me realize how much of a newbie I am.
If anyone is patient enough, I would like to have some clarifications, please. I would like to convert a .docx file (with both cyrillic and latin characters) to .epub. I own a Sony PRS-650.

Originally Posted by kiklop74

1. Convert your source text into utf-8 encoded HTML

I did this by setting the utf-8 option in MS Word 2007 and then saving the file (let's call it example1) as a "webpage" (not as a single file webpage).

Originally Posted by kiklop74

2. Make sure HTML file has appropriate meta tag for charset

To modify the html file, I opened it with the Note Pad, and replaced the string <meta http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=windows-1252"> with the one given above.

Originally Posted by kiklop74

3. Download Liberation font pack from here https://fedorahosted.org/liberation-fonts/ and unpack them in the same folder with HTML file

a)Assuming the name of the html file is example1, is this the folder called example1_file or the folder which contains both the example1_file folder and the example1 file (sorry for the imprecise terminology)?


b) What should the final result of the unpacking be? The .tar file, of should this be unpacked again?

Originally Posted by kiklop74

4. Add this to the head section of your HTML file:

Where exactly in the head section? I succeded in converting the html file to epub through Calibre only by adding this just after the last occurrence of </style> (otherwise I got fail messages), but in any case with the resulting epub file question marks showed instead of cyrillic characters on the Sony Reader.

Finally, after doing these modifications with the Note Pad, is it correct to save the file with the extension .htm choosing utf-8 as encoding?

Thank you very much for any reply.