PDF/Mobibook Conversion Problem

[ascherjim]

A Calibre simple(?) conversion from pdf to Mobibook seems to work fine -- EXCEPT: every page is then individually labeled on my BeBook device "Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html"

Is it possible in the Calibre conversion process to remove these very annoying "announcements"?

[Ravensknight]

I've come across this too and the only way I've gotten around it is rather laborious. Once I've converted to epub I have to edit the file with Ecub and just find and replace the text creating that line. Pain in the butt. So I'm hoping somebody else has an easier solution

It has made me realized just how bad abclit is though! and people who use it to create pdf's really need some harsh discipline...

[user_none]

The "announcements" are part of the PDF. You will need to crop them out of the document to prevent them from being in the conversion output.

[wallcraft]

Is there a reason to go from LIT to PDF and then back to MOBI? Calibre usually does a good job of LIT to MOBI.

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by user_none

The "announcements" are part of the PDF. You will need to crop them out of the document to prevent them from being in the conversion output.

By going to the ABC Amber website, I've discovered that the phrase "Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html" is attached to the converted document only when using their free trial version. Apparently if you register and pay a modest $12.95 fee, that "announcement" will no longer appear in the converted text. As I believe I'll have future use of this product, I think I'll pay to register. I'm guessing the reason that announcement appears in the Calibre conversion is that Calibre is (understandably) incorporating only the free trial version.

[itimpi]

Calibre has nothing to do with the ABC products and does not make use of them. It can do its own conversions and normally does a far better job of it than the ABC products (I know because I also have the paid-for ABC products for a number of formats).

What will have happened is that whoever produced the ebook you were trying to convert using Calibre must have used the ABC products during the conversion of that book from some other format to the one you obtained. This would not have been an issue if you had an ebook in the format produced by the orginal authoring package. I have often seen this by-line on books obtained via non-commercial routes.

Having said that, some sort of facility in Calibre for removing certain strings from the text during conversion is not a bad idea. At the moment one could do this sort of replacement manually, by why not make it a more automated process. Particularily if the string can be specified in some format (e.g. Regular Expression) that means an element of wild cards can be incorporated. Maybe it is worth raising a ticket to make this a feature request?

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by itimpi

Calibre has nothing to do with the ABC products and does not make use of them. It can do its own conversions and normally does a far better job of it than the ABC products (I know because I also have the paid-for ABC products for a number of formats).

What will have happened is that whoever produced the ebook you were trying to convert using Calibre must have used the ABC products during the conversion of that book from some other format to the one you obtained. This would not have been an issue if you had an ebook in the format produced by the orginal authoring package. I have often seen this by-line on books obtained via non-commercial routes.

Thanks for your very useful clarification. THAT is obviously what happened. The on-line seller of the book which I purchased had employed the ABC product. Now that I have paid for and registered my ABC application, I trust that the "offending" announcement will appear no more.

[//QUOTE]Having said that, some sort of facility in Calibre for removing certain strings from the text during conversion is not a bad idea. At the moment one could do this sort of replacement manually, by why not make it a more automated process. Particularily if the string can be specified in some format (e.g. Regular Expression) that means an element of wild cards can be incorporated. Maybe it is worth raising a ticket to make this a feature request?[/QUOTE]

Maybe some other interested forum member can do this as I know nothing about opening tickets.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

The on-line seller of the book which I purchased had employed the ABC product. Now that I have paid for and registered my ABC application, I trust that the "offending" announcement will appear no more.

It makes me rather suspicious of the source of your file. Unless it was from the author directly, it sounds like you paid money to someone ripping the book off. (No normal publisher would generate the PDF from the LIT using a trail version of some software.)

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

It makes me rather suspicious of the source of your file. Unless it was from the author directly, it sounds like you paid money to someone ripping the book off. (No normal publisher would generate the PDF from the LIT using a trail version of some software.)

This was my source:

[Link deleted by moderator]

[pdurrant]

A dodgy site. For instance, "The God Delusion" on their front page is available as a Kindle book (for a discounted $9.33) and at the Sony Store ($11.16) but I couldn't find it elsewhere.

This site is offering it at $2.50. I very much doubt that Richard Dawkins or his publishers will see any of that price.

Buy from legitimate sources, or get it free, but don't pay money to crooks like this site.

A good site for finding the best deal from genuine retailers is http://www.ebookprice.info/ although they don't cover everyone yet (In particular, http://webscription.net for SciFi/Fantasy and http://www.eharlequin.com/ for romance) but they do a prety good job.

Originally Posted by ascherjim

This was my source:

[site snipped by pdurrant]

[ascherjim]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

A dodgy site. For instance, "The God Delusion" on their front page is available as a Kindle book (for a discounted $9.33) and at the Sony Store ($11.16) but I couldn't find it elsewhere.

This site is offering it at $2.50. I very much doubt that Richard Dawkins or his publishers will see any of that price.

Buy from legitimate sources, or get it free, but don't pay money to crooks like this site.

A good site for finding the best deal from genuine retailers is http://www.ebookprice.info/ although they don't cover everyone yet (In particular, http://webscription.net for SciFi/Fantasy and http://www.eharlequin.com/ for romance) but they do a prety good job.

Thanks for the tip. I only purchased the Beckett title, as an experiment to see if I could convert it to Mobipocket. I just attempted to do that by using my newly purchased and registered ABC Amber PDF converter software to convert the purchased pdf file to HTML, then taking the resulting HTML file to Calibre for conversion to Mobipocket. The Calibre conversion worked (as before) but STILL retained the offending ABC Amber announcement (as before). The ABC Amber website states that such announcements would no longer appear. I am puzzled as to what to do next, short of querying ABC's technical people, which is what I may be forced to do (after maybe trying a few other ways to resolve this problem).

[pdurrant]

As I understand your original problem, the PDF you bought from the crooked web site contained text left over from conversion to PDF by the crooks using the free version of the Amber tools.

So no matter what tools you then use to convert from PDF, that text will be in the conversion.

Convert to HTML, and then do a search/replace to delete the text before converting to Mobipocket.

Originally Posted by ascherjim

Thanks for the tip. I only purchased the Beckett title, as an experiment to see if I could convert it to Mobipocket. I just attempted to do that by using my newly purchased and registered ABC Amber PDF converter software to convert the purchased pdf file to HTML, then taking the resulting HTML file to Calibre for conversion to Mobipocket. The Calibre conversion worked (as before) but STILL retained the offending ABC Amber announcement (as before). The ABC Amber website states that such announcements would no longer appear. I am puzzled as to what to do next, short of querying ABC's technical people, which is what I may be forced to do (after maybe trying a few other ways to resolve this problem).

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by ascherjim

The Calibre conversion worked (as before) but STILL retained the offending ABC Amber announcement (as before). The ABC Amber website states that such announcements would no longer appear.

I agree with itimpi: what you bought was originally a LIT ebook which was converted to PDF using a trial version of ABC Amber LIT Converter. This added the "Generated by" message to the PDF. Since it is in the original PDF, it isn't surprising that the MOBI version still includes it. What the ABC Amber web site is saying is that their conversion software won't add such messages if you buy the full version. It isn't saying that they will remove existing messages.

[itimpi]

I expect that the ABC message is probably embedded in the body of the file that you got. A paid for version of the ABC software will not add it, but it will not remove it if already there before the conversion.

In my experience Calibre does a better job of converting PDF files than the ABC software does. However it is nice to have both available for the problem ones.

[ascherjim]

Thanks guys for the clarifications and help. I think I know now how to proceed. Will let you know what I ultimately manage, and how.