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Old 11-19-2018, 03:36 PM   #1
radius
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How good are book tools on Windows?

I am thinking of running Windows 10 on my next PC after being away from Microsoft since Windows XP. Are book manipulation tools any good on Windows? My impression is that most hobbyist development nowadays is tilted towards open software, and thus platforms with a good POSIX command line and development tools.

What I mostly use right now is:

Sigil (in the past I have found this to be better on Linux and Mac than Windows)
kindlegen
kindleunpack
Kindle Comic Creator
DeDRM (and sometimes it's underlying components by command line like ineptepub)
koboify fonts
convert LIT
assorted PalmDOC tools and explode Plucker
vim


Thanks in advance for your thoughts!

Last edited by radius; 11-19-2018 at 03:42 PM.
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Old 11-21-2018, 04:40 PM   #2
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Sooo.... I guess everybody is on Mac and Linux then?
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Old 11-21-2018, 04:47 PM   #3
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I wasn't sure there was a real question there...lol.."any good" implies a great deal of subjective opinion.

I use Windows 10. Book manipulation tools are great....at least I haven't found any reason to go get a non-windows environment.
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Old 11-22-2018, 12:23 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
I am thinking of running Windows 10 on my next PC after being away from Microsoft since Windows XP. Are book manipulation tools any good on Windows? My impression is that most hobbyist development nowadays is tilted towards open software, and thus platforms with a good POSIX command line and development tools.

What I mostly use right now is:

Sigil (in the past I have found this to be better on Linux and Mac than Windows)
kindlegen
kindleunpack
Kindle Comic Creator
DeDRM (and sometimes it's underlying components by command line like ineptepub)
koboify fonts
convert LIT
assorted PalmDOC tools and explode Plucker
vim

Thanks in advance for your thoughts!
Under Windows (currently Windows 10), I have used Sigil, kindleunpack as a calibre plugin, various DeDRM tools, koboify (though recent updates to FontForge seem to have broken it on all platforms). I used to use ConvertLIT but haven't had any need to since I was converting all my .lit files when Microsoft was shutting down their DRM servers.

I would add calibre to the list since it replaces many of the tools you mention and when I was playing with some of books from the old Baen CD inserts, it does a better job of converting directly to epub than when I used ConvertLIT and other tools way back when.

As for Sigil working better on Mac and/or Linux? I've had more issues with Sigil on either than I have had with Sigil on Windows. As usual, YMMV.

As for PalmDoc and Plucker? Not formats that I done much with since I last read Mother of Demons on a Palm and that was more years ago that I care to remember.
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Old 11-22-2018, 02:58 PM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle91 View Post
I wasn't sure there was a real question there...lol.."any good" implies a great deal of subjective opinion.

I use Windows 10. Book manipulation tools are great....at least I haven't found any reason to go get a non-windows environment.
And my entire shop runs on Windows/Win10. We have a Linux box for this and that, and a Mac Mini for those times when I need to do step-by-step videos for a Mac user/client, but that's all. Everything we do is Windows-based,upon which we run Epsilon, NoteTabPro, Sigil (yeah, Sigil!), Calibre for cataloging and the occasional unpacking requirement from a MOBI built by someone else; and the usual. {shrug}. I'm not a programmer, although most of my guys are (oddly enough), and they seem to be quite happy with our working environment.

FWIW.

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Old 11-22-2018, 03:03 PM   #6
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Thanks guys. I don't know enough to know how much I don't know

More specifically, many of the tools are written in Python, sometimes with PyQT, and I was wondering how that works with Windows and how smoothly integrated it is. Is it hard to do git pulls on Windows? What kind of build environment should I set up, the free MS Visual Studio Community or some port of GNU tools?

After reading a bunch it looks like I should switch to Kindle Previewer instead of kindlegen. And I meant Kindle Comic Converter, not Creator, and that looks like Windows is a first class citizen for that.

I understand that Calibre hides a lot of this stuff from the user, but I specifically don't want to use Calibre because I have never liked it, neither its UI, nor its conversion, nor its editor.

Lately, I've been re-reading some old books and now regret my decision to change them into HTML or epub "someday" instead of right away. I even have a bunch of Peanut Press books I'm slowly changing to HTML haha.
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Old 11-23-2018, 04:52 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
More specifically, many of the tools are written in Python, sometimes with PyQT, and I was wondering how that works with Windows and how smoothly integrated it is.
Installing PyQt on a Windows machines is easy, however, many PyQt-based Linux/macOS tools require external libraries.

Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
Is it hard to do git pulls on Windows?
There's Git for Windows. You can also install a Linux subsystem on Windows 10 machines.

Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
What kind of build environment should I set up, the free MS Visual Studio Community or some port of GNU tools?
Since most developers provide Windows binaries, you don't need a build environment, unless you want to compile bleeding edge versions.

Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
After reading a bunch it looks like I should switch to Kindle Previewer instead of kindlegen.
Kindle Previewer actually runs KindleGen in the background. However, you'll need to install Kindle Previewer, if you want to generate KFX files with the Calibre KFX Output plugin, which is also available as a command line tool.

Quote:
Originally Posted by radius View Post
I understand that Calibre hides a lot of this stuff from the user, but I specifically don't want to use Calibre because I have never liked it, neither its UI, nor its conversion, nor its editor.
The Calibre GUI has been designed with non-technical users in mind, however, Calibre Editor has the same features as Sigil. Some are even better than their Sigil equivalents.
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Old 11-23-2018, 11:28 AM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Doitsu View Post
Installing PyQt on a Windows machines is easy
Quote:
There's Git for Windows.
Thanks!

Quote:
You can also install a Linux subsystem on Windows 10 machines.
In which case, surely it is better to stay on Linux? Oh, it looks like X support might take a while to come too (just in time for the move to Wayland maybe haha)

Quote:
Since most developers provide Windows binaries, you don't need a build environment, unless you want to compile bleeding edge versions.
Of course. Doesn't everyone find it fun to poke around? I think I got used to this with Sigil, as development often out-paced by far what was available from, say, Mac Ports etc.

Oh man, I just realized I still have Sony books that I need to use LRFTools on too. Hope Java is well supported in Windows... I am still kicking myself for trying to do my archiving in one go as opposed to immediately when I acquired each book.
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Old 11-23-2018, 06:24 PM   #9
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Oh man, I just realized I still have Sony books that I need to use LRFTools on too. Hope Java is well supported in Windows... I am still kicking myself for trying to do my archiving in one go as opposed to immediately when I acquired each book.
Again for conversions, I would use calibre. It is just a bit better supported than most of the old conversion programs I used at one time or another.
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Old 11-26-2018, 04:50 AM   #10
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If you really want an editor, most guys I know have switched to Visual Studio Code (not to be mistaken with Visual Studio). It has many options and packages available and the user community for new functionality is great. Git support is built in and it runs on Windows/Linux/Mac. You can edit almost anything in it with support for color coding, linting, etc. It has support for Python, Perl, C++, C#, PHP, HTML, CSS, Go and much, much more.

It is basically a text editor on steriods with many good options. Or so I am told, I haven't made the switch myself yet...
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Old 02-12-2019, 02:43 PM   #11
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So far my transition has been:

- Sigil: smooth
- kindlepreviewer instead of kindlegen: I haven't made a successful book yet; it seems to be complaining about links to missing files. I'm going to cut down to the simplest helloworld book possible and try again
- KCC: haven't tried yet as I have been doing this on a Linux box
- DeDRM: I find the Mac drop target and Linux CLI easier. I might break down and just use Calibre for this instead
- convertLIT: I'm using the builtin Linux support for this since convlit is an Ubuntu package; the bash command line is just easier to deal with for me than Windows' terminal. I'd rather re-create my own epubs by hand than use Calibre's conversion
- Palm tools: since I went over to the Dark Side anyways, I am just going to do a conversion with Calibre and then clean that up by hand
- vim: I've decided to spend some time getting used to Atom instead
- development: I'm still trying to figure out what mix of things I need

My biggest issue right now is standard Windows font display is not all that attractive.
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Old 02-12-2019, 05:15 PM   #12
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You don't have to use calibre's library manager if you don't need that functionality. It comes with a set of separate command line tools, which includes editor and viewer.

BR

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Old 02-14-2019, 10:08 AM   #13
HarryT
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- kindlepreviewer instead of kindlegen: I haven't made a successful book yet; it seems to be complaining about links to missing files. I'm going to cut down to the simplest helloworld book possible and try again
Just to note that there is a Windows version of kindlegen. No need to use Kindle Previewer if you prefer kindlegen.
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