Where did this come from?

[ArizonaGuy]

And how do I get rid of it?

I have an old paper history book that I wanted in eBook form, but that is not available anywhere, so I decided to convert the book myself by scanning the pages of my paper version. The work was a pain in the neck, but I was able to scan all of the pages of each chapter and convert the scans to digital form (as rtf files) online. I then used Calibre to convert the individual rtf files to ePub format.

So far, so good, but Calibre inserted a character at the start of every epub book and I don't know why. It is not a big problem, but it is annoying because I don't know why it appeared and I have had trouble removing it.

I have attached screenshots of the start of one chapter in rtf format and the same in the ePub format. Can anyone tell me why this character showed up and how to prevent it? I can probably go through all of the (many) chapters and do it by editing the output, but if I ever go through the pain of doing this again I would like to avoid the issue.

Thanks.

[JSWolf]

What does the scanned page look like?

[BetterRed]

It may be too late, but RTF is not a format I would choose to convert from, see ==>> What are the best source formats to convert?

I would have chosen DOCX as a starting format, most (all ?) OCR scanning software can create DOCX, and the calibre DOCX Conversion Input module was written by and is actively maintained by Kovid Goyal. I also know of several other ways to convert DOCX to EPUB.

BR

[ArizonaGuy]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

What does the scanned page look like?

I have attached a screenshot of the first part of the first chapter of the scanned file. That corresponds to the rtf and ePub screenshots, but that annoying character addition generated by Calibre's conversion of the rtf to ePub appears at the start of every chapter file after the conversion.

I am not sure what the scan page has to do with this as the rtf file is the one that is converted, but I suppose there could be some invisible character embedded.

FWIW - I also converted the rtf file to plain text and there is no such character in the start of the text file.

[JSWolf]

Save the RTF as DOCX and convert that.

[ArizonaGuy]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

It may be too late, but RTF is not a format I would choose to convert from, see ==>> What are the best source formats to convert?

I would have chosen DOCX as a starting format, most (all ?) OCR scanning software can create DOCX, and the calibre DOCX Conversion Input module was written by and is actively maintained by Kovid Goyal. I also know of several other ways to convert DOCX to EPUB.

BR

The online conversion site that I used only displayed the rtf file. I copied and pasted it into TextEdit on my Mac. I used that site because the scan to text processing was flawless, even when the scanned page was distorted due to how paper book pages don't lie completely flat when processing pages at the start and end of the book. Unless I want to destroy the binding, which I don't want to do.

There is some history here. I downloaded some of Durant's Story of Civilization from archive.org and those files were scanned and had to be converted to text if I wanted to be able to search. I used several conversion websites and every one of them gave me gave me mixed results with some sections of poor translation. Even the big name sites. So when I found this site that produced perfect translations I wanted to use it regardless of how the output was formatted.