[GUI Plugin] EpubMerge

[TMF]

Thanks! This worked, although strangely Calibre now says: installed version 1.2.5, available version 1.2.4.

I can confirm that the epubmerge plugin now correctly works for me too. It's a great help, and I really appreciate it!

[JimmXinu]

I didn't get the Plugin Index updated apparently. Should be fixed shortly. Thanks for pointing it out.

[TMF]

A minor bug report: When merging books, the merged book has the publication date of January 101. Shouldn't it default to the earliest date from among the merged books?

[JimmXinu]

EpubMerge doesn't set the Published date at all.

It's showing up as 'Undefined' for me on Windows in Edit Metadata and blank in the library list. I suspect which ever version of calibre you're using is taking that as some version of 0 instead, which translates to Jan 101.

[Lantz]

When the chapters are named chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 the extension works fine until your reach 10 then the sorting has to be redone manually to get the chapters in the right order. Is there a way to re-do the sort to account for this?
I am downloading multiple pages as html and converting to epub however the downloader I use saves as mentioned and I can't find a way to change the saving name.

Thanks and I hope you understood that rambling.

Lance

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by Lantz

When the chapters are named chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 the extension works fine until your reach 10 then the sorting has to be redone manually to get the chapters in the right order. Is there a way to re-do the sort to account for this?

EpubMerge only sorts when you click the 'Title' column header in the EpubMerge window. Until then, it uses the same order that the input epubs appeared in the calibre library.

I suggest that you use the calibre series column to order the input epubs before calling EpubMerge. (The Manage Series plugin can help with that.)

[JimmXinu]

I have an experimental new version of EpubMerge I could use some volunteers to test.

While EpubSplit is the natural opposite of EpubMerge, because of the way EpubSplit works, it doesn't give you back quite what you started with in terms of interior structure. Plus you have to manually select where to split for each merged book to get them back.

This EpubMerge version offers an alternative though two new options.

First, there's a Keep UnMerge Metadata? option in the configuration for EpubMerge now. If set, a copy of the original metadata for each merged book will be included, allowing for UnMerge. This includes your calibre custom columns. Leave off if you plan to distribute the epub to others.

Second, there's now a menu option under EpubMerge to UnMerge Epub. You must have Keep UnMerge Metadata? when you merge the epub before you can use UnMerge.

(There's also a menu now under the button with Merge, UnMerge and Config.)

UnMerge will extract all the original source epubs in (I believe) very nearly the same form as they appeared originally into new books in calibre. If you already have the same books in your library, you will be offered the option to add another, overwrite the epub in the existing book, or discard the extracted epub.

I've interested in hearing if a) this seems like a useful feature and b) if it works as expected for you.

Thanks.

Update Feb 19 2013 -- Remove obsolete beta versions

[iatheia]

I do have something of a feature request/bug report.
I've encountered a multi-chaptered story with html broken enough so that Sigil couldn't handle direct importing of the code. So I've used dotEPUB to download individual pages, as it did help with formatting a bit. I used this plugin to combine them all into one story, and then wanted to use Sigil to edit it to make it look presentable/delete unnecessarily generated stuff/have actual chapter names instead of just the story title for every single one of them etc. The problem was that even though all the chapters originally appeared in order, Sigil can't recognize it and arranges them almost randomly. So even if I were to do nothing but save the file once it was opened, it would be messed up. Trying to reorder them just breaks it up even further.

Would it be possible to make these files editable, and perhaps have an option of arranging them like a true book instead of anthology? And, perhaps, if you have time, remove extra title/disclaimer pages generated by dotEPUB?

[iatheia]

Thinking about this a bit more, reconverting the resulted file back to epub does appear to solve the problem of mismatched chapters.

[JimmXinu]

Originally Posted by iatheia

The problem was that even though all the chapters originally appeared in order, Sigil can't recognize it and arranges them almost randomly.

I'm aware that Sigil doesn't handle EpubMerge's output very well. But I think it's an issue with Sigil, not EpubMerge. It's on my wish list of things to do to look at Sigil's import code someday.

I'm not familiar with dotepub.com. I'll have to take a look at it. (EpubMerge does have a little bit of special code for making merges of FFDL epubs nicer than usual.)

If re-converting fixed your TOC issue, I wonder if using EpubMerge's Flatten TOC option would have helped.

[iatheia]

Originally Posted by JimmXinu

If re-converting fixed your TOC issue, I wonder if using EpubMerge's Flatten TOC option would have helped.

Not really. It still does whatever it wants to.

I'm not familiar with dotepub.com. I'll have to take a look at it. (EpubMerge does have a little bit of special code for making merges of FFDL epubs nicer than usual.)

I was searching for something that would conveniently download html files in epub format, and it seemed to be the most common one. Has nice plugins for Chrome and Firefox, too. Only pity, it downloads only one page at a time, can't do a bulk conversion. If you know of an alternative where you can feed it several links at once, I'd be most grateful.

[JimmXinu]

www.grabmybooks.com looks like it might do what you want.

[iatheia]

It appears to turn everything into plain text, doesn't keep the formatting of italics and such =(

[JimmXinu]

Version 1.3.1 - 19 Feb 2013

• Add UnMerge and 'Keep Metadata for UnMerge' options.
• Expose an API for other plugins (eg FFDL) to call.

[brainvision]

Hi JimmXinu..

I'm trying to merge a large number of epub into an only one, bugger.. The number of the file is 60, but they are really really small, about 50 kB each one..
I recieved the following error..

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "calibre_plugins.epubmerge.dialogs", line 82, in do_loop
  File "calibre_plugins.epubmerge.dialogs", line 91, in do_when_finished
  File "calibre_plugins.epubmerge.epubmerge_plugin", line 546, in _start_merge
  File "calibre_plugins.epubmerge.epubmerge_plugin", line 182, in do_merge
  File "calibre_plugins.epubmerge.epubmerge", line 191, in doMerge
  File "xml/dom/minidom.py", line 1929, in parseString
  File "xml/dom/expatbuilder.py", line 32, in <module>
  File "xml/parsers/expat.py", line 4, in <module>
ImportError: /opt/calibre/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload/pyexpat.so: undefined symbol: XML_SetHashSalt

I thought the error could be related to large number of files, but even trying to merge only 2 or 5 of them gives me the same error..

I'm attaching a few of those files hoping it could help you to understand what's going on..
Thanks so much for your help!!