conversion problem?

[mountainman80]

Hi, I am new here and am not sure if this was discussed in another post. I recently converted an ebook from pdf to epub using calibre software for my ipod touch. While reading completed book, I noticed words that should have started with "th" now start with "m" on some of the pages on my ipod touch. I use stanza to read my books. I am not sure why this is. Any ideas?

[JSWolf]

PDF is not a good format to convert from. There is no software available that can convert a novel length PDF without errors. The only way to fix the errors is to compare the PDF to the ePub and fix all the errors. I know it can be a long and tedious process, but it's the only way to do it to get a resulting ePub with no conversion errors.

[A J Edwards]

I am having nothing but problems trying to convert books that I have written to epub. As far as I am concerned all teh software goe in the wrong direction! As a writer I want to convert from MS Word (.doc) to .epub and I want it to be WYSIWYG. I have been using Calibre by saving my book as an HTML document and then having Calibre convert it to epub. Unfortunately it is not WYSIWYG, it adds extra blank lines. Even When I edit the document and try and remove line feeds where not strictly necessary I still get extra lines added whenever I have a short line. For example:

"This is a test
to see if it works."

comes out as

"This is a test

to see if it works."

Can anybody help?

[DaleDe]

How are you creating the short lines? You should be using shift/enter to create them. If not then they are treated as separate paragraphs.

Dale

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by A J Edwards

I am having nothing but problems trying to convert books that I have written to epub. As far as I am concerned all teh software goe in the wrong direction! As a writer I want to convert from MS Word (.doc) to .epub and I want it to be WYSIWYG. I have been using Calibre by saving my book as an HTML document and then having Calibre convert it to epub. Unfortunately it is not WYSIWYG, it adds extra blank lines. Even When I edit the document and try and remove line feeds where not strictly necessary I still get extra lines added whenever I have a short line. For example:

"This is a test
to see if it works."

comes out as

"This is a test

to see if it works."

Can anybody help?

Originally Posted by DaleDe

How are you creating the short lines? You should be using shift/enter to create them. If not then they are treated as separate paragraphs.

Dale

To piggyback on DaleDe's comment, one of the limitations of HTML is that by default it puts a blank line after each paragraph. It is possible to change this via cascading style sheets (CSS).

When you hit Shift-Enter in MS Word it puts a line break into the paragraph, and moves the text following the line break to the next line, but it still considers the text before and after the line break as one paragraph.

If you want to edit the HTML directly, you can insert the line break tag (<br>) where you want the text to break. To provide an example that I hope is clear:

Using your example, if you hit the return where you want the line to break you will get something like the following in HTML:

<p>"This is a test</p>
<p>to see if it works."</p>

and it will display like this:

"This is a test

to see if it works."

However, when you type the following:

<p>"This is a test<br>to see if it works."</p>

you will get this:

"This is a test
to see if it works."

I hope this helps.

[alecE]

There is a similar discussion in the Calibre forum; if I've got the link right it should be here

[A J Edwards]

Many thanks for this. My view is that if I have the "perfect document" in MS Word then the conversion software should be capable of delivering it exactly the same in epub format. It should not be necessary to mess around editing the document.
My interest is in writing books - not in messing about with them. I have also had a good look at various other packages and quite frankly none of them really deliver the goods.
Perhaps this is why they are free? Surely someone out ther has a commercial package that can deliver the goods? I live in hope.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by A J Edwards

Many thanks for this. My view is that if I have the "perfect document" in MS Word then the conversion software should be capable of delivering it exactly the same in epub format. It should not be necessary to mess around editing the document.

I think you need to choose different program than MS Word to create the docuemnt. While the document in MS Word looks perfect, the underlying representation in HTML is a hopeless mess.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by A J Edwards

Many thanks for this. My view is that if I have the "perfect document" in MS Word then the conversion software should be capable of delivering it exactly the same in epub format. It should not be necessary to mess around editing the document.
My interest is in writing books - not in messing about with them. I have also had a good look at various other packages and quite frankly none of them really deliver the goods.
Perhaps this is why they are free? Surely someone out ther has a commercial package that can deliver the goods? I live in hope.

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

I think you need to choose different program than MS Word to create the docuemnt. While the document in MS Word looks perfect, the underlying representation in HTML is a hopeless mess.

To see an example of the kind of HTML that MS Word delivers, create a short document in MS Word, save it as HTML, and then open it in a text editor. This can be a real eye opener.