amalthia: (Default)
Amalthia ([personal profile] amalthia) wrote in [community profile] fanfic_ebooks2009-01-20 02:16 pm

This post is for Kindle and Cybook users

for a long time Sony users were able to use the program Calibre to manage our ebook library, and convert LIT, Mobi, html, rtf/word documents into LRF or Epub. It's a GREAT program. I use it all the time.

Now Kindle and Cybook users can use Calibre too. I checked the changelog for the newest version. http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/wiki/Changelog and it appears that they've added Kindle and Cybook detection and the ability to convert files to mobi. (I'm sure the first version will probably have bugs but what I'm going to test tonight is batch convert and see if I can make mulitple mobipocket files)

I'm rather excited about this development. :)

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-20 11:53 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay, so I downloaded it and I can't see a way to convert a file to a mobi file. Where is the command line?

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 12:26 am (UTC)(link)
Heh. Yeah, when you said command line, I was thinking inside the program, not the *windows command line*. But I figured it out.

And it did work. I used an rtf file and created a *.mobi file which I loaded manually (which is the only way to load them as far as I can tell) and could read it. So, yay!

This is actually easier than mobipocket creator.

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 12:45 am (UTC)(link)
I've been playing with it. It likes simple html all right and simple rtf, but anything fancy doesn't work as well.

I have a story I just tried to code and it couldn't deal with the different fonts and colors. I got one long file of text without breaks at all.

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 12:56 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah. I think it may hang on bigger files, too. I've just tried to create a file that was just under a meg. It's still either processing it, or it's hung. Still, it's so easy to use.

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 01:04 am (UTC)(link)
Okay, I was wrong. It did convert the big rtf file, but it took about 7-8 minutes.

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 10:41 am (UTC)(link)
Yes, it did come out eventually. And it took about 7-8 minutes. I commented on my post after it finally finished. The smaller files were very quick.

Re: p.s.

[identity profile] meri-oddities.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 12:27 am (UTC)(link)
Python is not required. I just went to the directory where the file was and typed any2mobi [file name] and it took a second or two, and then it was there. It does not like fancy html, however.

[identity profile] mrs-norris-mous.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 12:15 am (UTC)(link)
Are there enough people out there for me to really try and make my sugar quill module released into the main core ?

It Can work reliably for lrf but epub is a right pain !

[identity profile] mrs-norris-mous.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 10:41 pm (UTC)(link)
Given the choice would you prefer me to spend some time next week, working on the sugar quill and epub ( Which basically means stipping as much formatting out until the prs-505 stops crashing ) or having ago at another site ?

The html on the sugar quill is really nasty as they let the authors just paster raw html into the page so often they have multiple headers etc. And Microsoft word produces evil html and style sheets as well.

Given enough time a script could be produced to do something useful with any site. Its the enough time thing thats the problem.

I have been working on doing a good job at transforming comics, for the last couple of weeks.

comics

[identity profile] mrs-norris-mous.livejournal.com 2009-01-21 11:32 pm (UTC)(link)

I looked into the comic2lrf and I have very good eyesight and I can read the comics and they do look good. However sometimes the text is too small, After hassling kovid about lrf and epub. I discovered that the rendering engine does the right thing for landscape mode pdfs ( eg you can get more pixels in ). So I did the work for comic2pdf which i think you can guess what it does....

( It requires reportlabs which kovid's not going to bundle until verison .5 which is going to be in the next month or so ), but it does work :)

I have got a version yet to be integrated which will take a directory and generae a pdf with table of contents where each directory is a sub table of contents and each file is a table of contents entry, its very sweet I just need to do the merge back in with the main code.