Calibre-merge 2 language ePub files

[smashingpuffins]

Hello, this is my first post. I thank you in advance for your replies.

I am trying to merge 2 different language ePub files. 1 is in russian and the other in English. Both of the ePub files have identical clickable links that bring up content in there respective languages. I want to have content merged paragraph by paragraph with the links still working. I was successful in copy and pasting the content paragraph by paragraph although it was time consuming and it looked great in calibre viewer however when I loaded the ePub in my iBooks my iPad showed errors and I no longer could see the text in both languages and the links didn't work either.

Can anyone help me with how I could effectively merge the content of these different ePub files so that all the links work and it will be 1 paragraph in English and 1 in Russian and alternating throughout the whole ebook?

Jeremy

[arspr]

Wow!

That seems pretty impossible to me. I cannot see an automated way to merge (mixing) paragraphs from two different html files into a single one but by copy/paste-ing each one of them in the desired place (and as you say that's pretty time consuming)...

The rest of the troubles (links with the same id) are possibly more or less easy to solve.

But nevertheless, I would like you to ask you what your html/css/epub knowledge is. I mean, mixing two books is not only mixing the text. You have to watch how the styling of each book goes (CSS) and how you need to port them. Or, as you have suffered, if you have links (I suppose through <a> tags) you have to correctly re-link them. Also, you are talking about a Russian book so *maybe* it also has embedded fonts as not all device default fonts have enough unicode support and therefore adding a good font to your book is probably a good idea...

So there's a lot of small (and not so small) issues which can arise in the process. Unless you do know at least some basic html/css/epub coding, I don't see how you are going to success...

[smashingpuffins]

Arspr thanks for the reply!
Well I figured it out! It is quite time consuming and I wish I had the ability to stream line but I took you suggestion and copy and pasted the code from the Russian epub into the English ePub at the corresponding sections within the HTML editor. This was pretty easy, now came the issue of fixing the identically named citations/links within the 2 epubs. What I decided to do was rename the citations within the HTML code by adding an "a" after the citation/link number. For example <citation1> in the English ePub stayed the same while in the Russian I manually renamed it <citation1a> and this effectively worked although was time consuming. Fortunately the book was short with only 56 citations!!! If anyone has any interest in this you can by all means ask me for more detail. Of course if anybody has anymore suggestions on how this could be streamlined I'm all ears!

Thanks again.

[eschwartz]

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=222054

Parallel texts might be nice... unfortunately few are interested, though this experimental Android app explores the idea.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by smashingpuffins

I am trying to merge 2 different language ePub files. 1 is in russian and the other in English. Both of the ePub files have identical clickable links that bring up content in there respective languages.

Since you're interested in Russian, check out Aglona Reader, if you have a Windows PC or an Android tablet. The author also offers a couple of free Russian-English books for download.