10-18-2011, 07:25 PM | #1 |
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Text --> ePub
I've been trolling through the forums a little bit and have gleaned a few tips for converting text documents to ePub. Are there any other pitfalls I should be concerned about?
Also, how many of you out there convert text/word documents to ePub. I have a sizable amount of books that are in that format and was wondering if it's worth the time and effort to convert all of them. Thanks! |
10-18-2011, 07:31 PM | #2 |
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I generally import them in Sigil first.
Calibre would often screw up the formatting of text files pretty badly, but if you load them in Sigil first, they work much better. I also have couple of regex expressions to automatically find chapters and break them up, which is something Calibre also doesn't do very well |
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10-18-2011, 10:41 PM | #3 |
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You might try 2epub.com. Not sure about Word, but I uploaded an OpenOffice doc and the conversion was pretty good. It even created a chapter point at a manual page break.
Other than that, creating using Calibre, I like to put each chapter into its own HTML and create an index that I import into Calibre. Then I just use ePubFixer to remove the HTML TOC. It requires some search and replace editing, but works exactly like I want. |
10-18-2011, 10:43 PM | #4 |
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Calibre does a great job of converting text to epub. If it didn't come out right delete the epub look at the text input setting and adjust accordingly. Learn about the heuristics section and you can usually get great TOCs produced at the same time with standard Chapter naming.
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10-18-2011, 10:44 PM | #5 |
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I imported most of my old text files.
Most turned out fine after heuristic processing Definitely worth it to me although you can often find better formatted files of PD books here or other places. While I appreciate the time and effort put into formatting a book, unless it is butt ugly I don't notice much (if at all) after the first page or two. Helen |
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10-18-2011, 10:46 PM | #6 |
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Text is great to work with as a starting format - especially if you do a bit of work formatting using Textile or Markdown first, and use/abuse the extra css option. Check this post for an example, and there are a lot of forum discussions on both if you search for them. The newer txtz input format even gives you the ability to include images with a text file to go into the final format.
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10-19-2011, 07:23 AM | #7 |
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With plain text documents I always use Markdown formatting prior to ePub conversion. Calibre has a Markdown option which works very well.
Full details of Markdown can be found at http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ (You don't need to download Markdown, just understand the syntax.) At conversion time, on the Text Input page, set: Paragraph style to "off" and Formatting style to "markdown". |
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