Fix laggy highlights in Discworld?

[aelius]

Hello all!

As some of you may know, Terry Pratchet's Discworld series of books don't have chapters.

Which means, in the kepub, an entire book is contained in a single "chapter" file. I believe this is the reason that highlighting can lock up my Elipsa 2E for 20s or more. In particular when I'm trying to extend a highlight I just made.

I'm wondering if anyone had suggestions for how I might reprocess the kepubs to fix the problem. Ideally without changing the way the book is rendered visually.

Thanks!

[patrik]

If it is without drm, you can easily do an epub to epub conversion in Calibre. Check the "epub output" part and enable the option "Split file larger". Automatic.

Or you can use Sigil (or Calibre Editor) and split it manually as you like.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by aelius

Hello all!

As some of you may know, Terry Pratchet's Discworld series of books don't have chapters.

Which means, in the kepub, an entire book is contained in a single "chapter" file. I believe this is the reason that highlighting can lock up my Elipsa 2E for 20s or more. In particular when I'm trying to extend a highlight I just made.

I'm wondering if anyone had suggestions for how I might reprocess the kepubs to fix the problem. Ideally without changing the way the book is rendered visually.

Thanks!

You are wrong here. I've edited most of the Discworld books and they are not in one single file. They are split. What I do is fix the splits so they split as a section break. But in no way are the Discworld books on single HTML because there are no chapters.

What I have found occasionally is that one HTML file is larger then it should be. But that's not in every book. So what you could be finding is that you are highlighting in some of these longer HTML files. It's not every HTML file and not in every Discworld book.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by patrik

If it is without drm, you can easily do an epub to epub conversion in Calibre. Check the "epub output" part and enable the option "Split file larger". Automatic.

Or you can use Sigil (or Calibre Editor) and split it manually as you like.

That is a not a good idea. The problem is that with the HTML file that are longer, that would leave small HTML files that are short. It's best to take the longer HTML and find the last section break and take the rest of the story and movie it to the next HTML.

Using the calibre error checker, it will report when an HTML is too long.

[aelius]

Out of curiosity I examined all 39 books I have.

I found that of 39 books, 26 had the entirety of the book in a single "chapter 1 xhtml".
Only 13 books had the book split across multiple files.
Of those 13 books, 12 had conventional chapters anyway, and only 1 (Small Gods) had no chapters but still distributed across two xhtml (presumably for size).

I don't doubt you've seen differently formatted Discworld ebook releases, but unfortunately the ones I picked up from a recent HumbleBundle (published by HarperCollins) do suffer from this.

What do you mean by section break?

I did try patrik's suggestion and it seems to be sound advice. The concern about creating many xhtml files is unfounded, I think, since the feature explicitly splits by configurable file size (with a suggested 260KB).

Annoyingly this is not an option in the kepub output, so I'd be doing two conversion passes and I'd rather do none. I fear automatically applying sweeping changes, when I'd rather just fix the issue in front of me.

Thanks!

[rashkae]

Here are some changes you can make to default calibre conversion options to minimize unwanted formating changes.

Look & Feel, Fonts Tab, Check "Disable Font Size rescaling"

Heuristic Processin, uncheck "Enable Heuristic Processing"

Page Setup, Change output profile to Tablet

Structure Detection, change Chapter Mark to None

This is not 100% perfect, but works well for most e-books you run across. The one annoying thing I very rarely find is books that come with a large left margin , and a *negative* margin on the paragraphs to compensate. When processed by calibre conversion, the original martin is removed, and the paragraph negative margin moves the visible left edge off the page.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by aelius

Out of curiosity I examined all 39 books I have.

I found that of 39 books, 26 had the entirety of the book in a single "chapter 1 xhtml".
Only 13 books had the book split across multiple files.
Of those 13 books, 12 had conventional chapters anyway, and only 1 (Small Gods) had no chapters but still distributed across two xhtml (presumably for size).

I don't doubt you've seen differently formatted Discworld ebook releases, but unfortunately the ones I picked up from a recent HumbleBundle (published by HarperCollins) do suffer from this.

What do you mean by section break?

I did try patrik's suggestion and it seems to be sound advice. The concern about creating many xhtml files is unfounded, I think, since the feature explicitly splits by configurable file size (with a suggested 260KB).

Annoyingly this is not an option in the kepub output, so I'd be doing two conversion passes and I'd rather do none. I fear automatically applying sweeping changes, when I'd rather just fix the issue in front of me.

Thanks!

It seems newer version of Discworld eBooks have been changed.

Section breaks help to organize your story when changes such as the following occur:

• a switch to a different point of view
• the passage of time
• movement to another location

A section break in Discworld eBooks is shown as a blank space.