OpenOffice to ePub export extension

[Guns4Hire]

I use this quite often. Doesn't seem to be much development lately though. Which is to bad.

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by Guns4Hire

I use this quite often. Doesn't seem to be much development lately though. Which is to bad.

Wrong:
look at http://luke.simplicissimus.it/writer2epub and you will find a new version 0.1.11

News:
- Working image export
- new code for future styles export
- new code for TOC generation (not yet working).

The ePub generated is readable by most readers and softwares, but is not yet validated.
To validate it (and to create the TOC and metadata) just open the epub with Sigil, and save it without modifications.

Instead, the xsl version has temporarely stopped (0.2.x) and is removed from download.

Any help about developement is appreciated!

Luke

[roger64]

I tried the 0.1.11 and I have seen great progress.

I could nicely process text files. The extension requires the .odt suffix to be present if not it refuses to work.

It's pretty quick and precise for the text. You present an external stylesheet which is quite clean (uncluttered) and easy to modify which is quite useful. It's still incomplete though (some styles are missing).

As you said I've got no results for images.

Your proposal to complement it with Sigil for the time being makes a lot of sense. Sigil is excellent for inserting images, building TOC and filling up some meta-data, so...

Congratulations for your progresses. I think that, due to the existence of Sigil, the priority should be to focus on the missing "text-related" features, like footnotes, links and identification of some special styles like quotations, poetry, horizontal lines,..

I forgot to say that the automatic splitting and the creation of an external style sheet provided by your extension saves later a lot of time because these features do not exist yet in Sigil and have otherwise to be processed "manually".

As far as styles are concerned, I think a reasonable middle ground would be to provide first full support for what OpenOffice.org calls "html styles".

To go further, the user must be warned that he has to exercise some discipline and restraint before committing himself to produce an EPUB. Very often the multiplication of "automatic styles" comes from a user's bad practice (like using "select all" to modify text attributes) instead of strictly committing himself to the use of Stylist.

Very nice work.

[eBookLuke]

Thanks, Roger, for your testing.

There are a lot of work to do in this extension, the next step will be (probably):

- TOC creation
- Metadata editor (in advanced stage)
- Full styles support
- Full image and objects (tables?) support

In a couple of week I will release a new version

Luke

[omk3]

eBookLuke, thank you for myTXTcleaner, it just saved me a lot of trouble! A very useful little tool.

From your description, myTXTcleaner "removes all of the paragraph marks following lowercase letters, commas and semicolons". I think it might be a good idea to add numbers to this list. I just used it on a text with a lot of times and sums, and paragraph marks following numbers were not deleted. Other than in mathematical texts, I don't think there are a lot of instances where a paragraph can end in a number.

Thank you for your work!

[kiermel]

Wow! Thank you very much Luke

When the TOC works, will be almost perfect for me

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by omk3

I don't think there are a lot of instances where a paragraph can end in a number.

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
…

this is because I choose do not include the numbers in the list.

I can make even a selection in the start dialog to choose or not to remove paragraph marks after the number, can be useful?

Luke

[omk3]

Originally Posted by eBookLuke

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
…

this is because I choose do not include the numbers in the list.

I can make even a selection in the start dialog to choose or not to remove paragraph marks after the number, can be useful?

Luke

Oops, why didn't I think of that? Sorry... Obviously keeping the paragraph mark after the chapter heading is very important.

But yes, a selection might be useful, if you could do it. Even with chapter headings ending with numbers, it might be easier to do a search and replace afterwards to replace the erased paragraph marks, than to search through the whole text for all the other paragraph marks that remained.

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by omk3

Oops, why didn't I think of that?

tonight I think about a different approach:
a paragraph mark must be removed if:

the fisrt charachter of the NEXT line is lowercase
THEN
the last charachter of the PREVIOUS line in lowercase, comma, semicolon, colon

doing so I can remove:
in the last 5
years…

but not:
Chapter 5
Was a stormy night…

What do you think about?

Luke

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by Logseman

I have received this error:

There is a limitation in this extention.
MyTXTcleaner works only with pure text documents!
If you open a document with images, frames, tables or other object, the macro can stop, as you noted.

I don't have enought time to find a solution to avoid this, but I will study the problem when possible.

But, because the main scope of this extension is to clean .txt files or text copied from a .pdf, this problem is not so important, because in these cases there is only text.

Luke

[omk3]

Originally Posted by eBookLuke

tonight I think about a different approach:
a paragraph mark must be removed if:

the fisrt charachter of the NEXT line is lowercase
THEN
the last charachter of the PREVIOUS line in lowercase, comma, semicolon, colon

doing so I can remove:
in the last 5
years…

but not:
Chapter 5
Was a stormy night…

What do you think about?

Luke

I think it's an excellent idea.
It would maybe cause problems for things like poetry and other special cases, but these need special treatment anyway.

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by omk3

I think it's an excellent idea.
It would maybe cause problems for things like poetry and other special cases, but these need special treatment anyway.

Maybe I can set a minimum paragraph lenght, to prevent poetry shrinking.

Other suggestion or potential problems?

Luke

[eBookLuke]

Hi all,

a new version of writer2epub is available on my blog Luke's Macros

This version can handle the footnotes.

Luke

[McKGrif]

Hi, I came across your macro the same time I did Atlantis 'save to epub'. As an OOo user I would love to see this wysiwyg feature fully developed for the writer. I was wondering if the developers of Open Office are being of any assistance to you, and if there is anything that can be done to get them on board.

[eBookLuke]

Originally Posted by McKGrif

Hi, I came across your macro the same time I did Atlantis 'save to epub'. As an OOo user I would love to see this wysiwyg feature fully developed for the writer. I was wondering if the developers of Open Office are being of any assistance to you, and if there is anything that can be done to get them on board.

I don't have enought time to ask to developer, can you ask it for me?


The right way to esport (and maybe import) an epub, is a xsl filter.
I can't write this kind of filter, I'm not a programmer, and my extension is based on other people's code.

My goal is not to make a 100% wisiwig converter, but a a tool to create a good epub even from a not-so-clean text.
So, I use a pre-write CSS, instead to build the CSS based on the real styles present along the text.

Why I chose this way? Based on my experience, most of the text to convert are very dirty, full of styles similar each other, but meaningless. Even the scanned text suffers of this dirtyness.

Converting a such text, generate a dirty ePub, difficult to read and to correct, and in worst cases the CSS dimension is 2 to 10 times bigger than the text itself!

To convert a file to ePub, Calibre makes a wonderful works. To edit an ePub, there is Sigil that promises to be a big tool.
But for the rest of us, everyone wants to create a well readeble ePub with minimum effort, I write my extension…


Thanks for your support

Luke