conversion troubles

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Manichean

Chill. I was just using this to make some general comments not addressed to anyone in particular.

Consider me chilled, have a good day.

[N13L5]

Regrettably, I'm stuck with a lot of books where I have only the PDF to start from.

For books that are just text, the Calibre conversion does a rather nice job. Certainly good enough to avoid converting to RTF and then doing lengthy manual editing.

I will shortly try the epub > epub conversion mentioned earlier and see if there are improvements to TOC layout or chapter recognition.


But my real problem are books that rely on a lot of graphics; like converting O'Reilly's "Hello Android" book to epub yields an unusable mess.

So, my new question is this:

What is the best of the formats supported by Calibre to initially convert a graphics heavy PDF book to? Just RTF and straight to Microsoft Word for manual fixing?

or RTF and straight to Open Office for manual fixing and then saving directly as FB2 ?

or a different strategy completely?

[ldolse]

Best formats are html based formats, such as mobi, lrf, or html. CHM and Lit files can be decent too. Note any format is only as good as it's source. Many formats are based off Lit or RTF files, and as such can be hit or miss, depending on the original contributor of the file.

[itimpi]

LIT and EPUB are also HTML based. However (particularily in the case of LIT) the quality of the source material is always of paramount importance.

[ldolse]

True, but the majority of epub files are converted from some other source. Lit files are html based and are often an original source from the book's fanbase, but the quality is extremely hit and miss.

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by ldolse

True, but the majority of epub files are converted from some other source. Lit files are html based and are often an original source from the book's fanbase, but the quality is extremely hit and miss.

I agree with your statement about LIT files, particularily older ones. A lot of mine are fine as they were purchased in this format and covert with no problems, but a lot of non-offical versions meet your statement about being badly formatted. However I now get all new books in EPUB directly and they tend to be well formatted and do not need to be converted from a different format

[N13L5]

Originally Posted by ldolse

Best formats are html based formats, such as mobi, lrf, or html. CHM and Lit files can be decent too. Note any format is only as good as it's source. Many formats are based off Lit or RTF files, and as such can be hit or miss, depending on the original contributor of the file.

Originally Posted by itimpi

LIT and EPUB are also HTML based. However (particularily in the case of LIT) the quality of the source material is always of paramount importance.

ok so if html formatted books are better than RTF to edit...

out of the ones suggested, mobi, lrf, chm and lit, do you know which one has the best (open source?) editor? like some wysiwyg editor where I can just arrange things visually, that doesn't inject a ton of bad tags making the eventual epub output fail compliance tests?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by N13L5

like some wysiwyg editor where I can just arrange things visually, that doesn't inject a ton of bad tags making the eventual epub output fail compliance tests?

I don't have experience with these, but here are two that will save to epub directly.

Atlantis Word Processor

Open Office Writer with the Writer2Epub extension.

Good Luck.

[ldolse]

I've heard good things about those two apps. If you're only looking for ebook editing then you may want to try Sigil - it's dedicated to that task.

[N13L5]

Thank you for the suggestions!

I did try Sigil... at the time, all I wanted to do was add 12 separate HTML files (each comprising a chapter) to an ebook, and for the life of me, I couldn't do it! It would insist on creating a new book each time I tried to import the second HTML file...

I know there's a whole Wiki on Google.code and loads of other instructions. But I couldn't find what I was looking for inside an hour; so I thought: if I have to search longer than that just to find out how to add multiple HTML files to one book, the editing will get even worse and way too time consuming...

Granted, I could have overlooked something that's obvious to a seasoned Linux user, that just doesn't make sense to someone who's been using MS Office since release 1.


Gonna give Atlantis and Open Office a try... still wondering why one of the zillion VBA shops hasn't cranked out an epub saving plugin for MS Word

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by N13L5

Thank you for the suggestions!
... still wondering why one of the zillion VBA shops hasn't cranked out an epub saving plugin for MS Word

I started to create Writer2ePub using MS Word's macros. Unfortunately I had a lot of troubles because:
- MSWord macros are not cross platform compatible.
- There are too much bugs and undocumented functions.
- A macro needs to be rechecked or rewritten each time a new MSWord version is released.
- Some function essential to W2E are not available in MSWord and needs to call external programs.
- There is no a simple way to install a complex macro like W2E under MSWord.

So, two years ago, I discarded MSWord and I start to use the more powerful OOo (speaking about macro programming).

Luke