Mobipocket output

[llasram]

Early adopters,

Kovid has just released calibre version 0.4.129, which integrates at beta quality my support for generating Mobipocket format books. This feature is currently accessible from your favorite command-line shell via the expected ‘oeb2mobi’ and ‘any2mobi’ with the usual options (plus a few new ones).

Benefits and/or failings over other Mobipocket-generation tools:

• Full markup conversion. Normalizes all input into Mobipocket-specific, pure-formatting markup for as faithful rendering in Mobipocket readers as possible.
• Standards-compliant input over proprietary extensions. No support for Mobipocket-custom tags in input, but will generate Mobipocket-specific output for corresponding OPS and OPF features such as page breaks and non-linear content (e.g., footnotes).
• SVG rasterization. Here for the first time, but soon to appear in other format converters near you, full rasterization of SVG vector graphics. Tell all your friends – SVG is now safe and fun for the whole family of e-book readers!
• In-content TOC generation. Ensures that generated books have a TOC, whether they want one or not. Uses standard metadata TOC (OPF 2.0 NCX etc.) if an in-content TOC is not provided by the source.

Try it out now, and post your bug reports to the calibre trac!

[mtravellerh]

Tried it out. Works really fine so far.

Will the mobi creation be integrated in the GUI (once the beta phase is over?) Oh a little btw: I generate german books, too and I might like to rename the TOC to Inhalt or Inhaltsangabe and french books (Matières or Table de Matières) Any way to do that with the command line tool?

Now the "Inhaltsangabe" is converted to "Table of Contents". That is not very elegant. Still superior to mobigen, though.

Thanks for the work. This will be getting better than Creator.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Will the mobi creation be integrated in the GUI (once the beta phase is over?)

I believe that is Kovid's plan, yep.

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Oh a little btw: I generate german books, too and I might like to rename the TOC to Inhalt or Inhaltsangabe and french books (Matières or Table de Matières) Any way to do that with the command line tool?

Wow, such a typical American mistake. There is not at this time, but I'll correct that this evening.

Originally Posted by mtravellerh

Thanks for the work. This will be getting better than Creator.

Glad you find it useful.

[Format C:]

Originally Posted by llasram

Early adopters,

Kovid has just released calibre version 0.4.129, which integrates at beta quality my support for generating Mobipocket format books. This feature is currently accessible from your favorite command-line shell via the expected ‘oeb2mobi’ and ‘any2mobi’ with the usual options (plus a few new ones).

Benefits and/or failings over other Mobipocket-generation tools:

• Full markup conversion. Normalizes all input into Mobipocket-specific, pure-formatting markup for as faithful rendering in Mobipocket readers as possible.
• Standards-compliant input over proprietary extensions. No support for Mobipocket-custom tags in input, but will generate Mobipocket-specific output for corresponding OPS and OPF features such as page breaks and non-linear content (e.g., footnotes).
• SVG rasterization. Here for the first time, but soon to appear in other format converters near you, full rasterization of SVG vector graphics. Tell all your friends – SVG is now safe and fun for the whole family of e-book readers!
• In-content TOC generation. Ensures that generated books have a TOC, whether they want one or not. Uses standard metadata TOC (OPF 2.0 NCX etc.) if an in-content TOC is not provided by the source.

Try it out now, and post your bug reports to the calibre trac!

Can't wait to try it!!!!!!!!!

[wallcraft]

There are not a huge number of ePubs from commercial sources without DRM, but those that do exist provide a relatively wide range of ePub styles for testing. I looked at some of them from a chapter heading viewpoint in Ebook page design. So I tried using any2mobi (default settings) on these examples. About half failed, and I'll post bug reports on calibre trac. One surprise was that all three FeedBooks ePubs I tried failed to work. FeedBooks has its own MOBI option, but we should still be able to convert their ePub to MOBI.

The attached screenshots are from the original ePub (Adobe Digital Editions) and the any2mobi MOBI (Windows MobiPocket Reader).

Appleton's Alice's Adventures is from Adobe's free library. It works well except for color in the chapter header and quotation marks and other special characters which are not displayed correctly (wrong encoding?). MobiPocket isn't capable of wrapping text round an image, so that lack isn't any2mobi's fault.

One of the two Penguin samples I tried failed, the other worked very well except for indenting the start of paragraphs. Penguin's have embedded fonts, which are not being transfered. So far as I can tell, the ebook is just using the reader selected font (Times New Roman).

Rosetta's Red Alert is also in Adobe's free library. Its chapter header isn't transfering well, but the rest looks good except for the indenting of the 1st paragraph.

The threepress Huck Finn again has paragraph indent issues.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Appleton's Alice's Adventures is from Adobe's free library. It works well except for color in the chapter header and quotation marks and other special characters which are not displayed correctly (wrong encoding?).

Doh!, color! I forgot to add that to my written oeb2mobi todo list and apparently thus forgot to add color support to oeb2mobi. Watch for it in a later release...

I actually had tested converting that edition of Alice, but only with oeb2mobi. It's possible I introduced a regression, or that the error is in the any2* plumbing... I'll take a look this evening.

Originally Posted by wallcraft

One of the two Penguin samples I tried failed, the other worked very well except for indenting the start of paragraphs.

The extra spacing is added by the any2* option '--remove-paragraph-spacing'. Which, um, presently seems to be on by default with no way to turn it off. Kovid, am I missing something?

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Penguin's have embedded fonts, which are not being transfered. So far as I can tell, the ebook is just using the reader selected font (Times New Roman).

Mobipocket doesn't support font-embedding, so not much to be done there.

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Rosetta's Red Alert is also in Adobe's free library. Its chapter header isn't transfering well, but the rest looks good except for the indenting of the 1st paragraph.

No idea why that's happening... I'll have to grab a copy and see what's up.

[kovidgoyal]

Originally Posted by llasram

The extra spacing is added by the any2* option '--remove-paragraph-spacing'. Which, um, presently seems to be on by default with no way to turn it off. Kovid, am I missing something?

Typo, fixed. Now off by default. You can turn it off with
opts.remove_paragraph_spacing = False

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by llasram

Mobipocket doesn't support font-embedding, so not much to be done there.

It does in principle support specifying the font, which would presumably work if the font is available on the device. However, MobiPocket strongly recommends against specifying the font so perhaps this is an area best left alone.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

It does in principle support specifying the font, which would presumably work if the font is available on the device. However, MobiPocket strongly recommends against specifying the font so perhaps this is an area best left alone.

Absolutely, as the Mobi readers are spread over a wide range of OS's, the result tends to be quite desastrous if a font is not present in the system (I once saw a book in glorious Courier!)

[llasram]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Rosetta's Red Alert is also in Adobe's free library. Its chapter header isn't transfering well, but the rest looks good except for the indenting of the 1st paragraph.

Huh. I just fired up ADE on a Windows VM and grabbed Red Alert, but the version I was able to download is DRMed. So the mystery of the missing headers must live on...

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by llasram

Huh. I just fired up ADE on a Windows VM and grabbed Red Alert, but the version I was able to download is DRMed. So the mystery of the missing headers must live on...

Perhaps you got the PDF version. The ePub is here. All Adobe's sample ePubs are here.

[llasram]

Originally Posted by wallcraft

Perhaps you got the PDF version. The ePub is here. All Adobe's sample ePubs are here.

Nope, that's the URI I downloaded from, and what it netted me is a DRMed EPUB. It oddly enough did have a ".pdf" extension, but examining the file itself showed it to be a ZIP archive with the proper EPUB trappings plus a META-INF/encryption.xml covering all the files, all of which are in fact Adept DRM encrypted.

[kovidgoyal]

Version 0.4.130 has integrated MOBI output into the GUI. It should be working for all file types except comics.

[DDHarriman]

Yes it does, and it's great already!

Problems:

1 - image of the eBook cover, shows in the Cybook, does not show in Mobipocket Reader for the Desktop and for the PokectPC;

2 - it would be great if existed and option to compress the mobi file - mobipocket creator has 3 levels and if the 3th (high compression) takes a lot of time and it’s good just for compressing dictionaries, the 2th (standard compression) is acceptable and cuts the size of the eBook in half at least.

I understand that using any2mobi in command line one can do the compression I ask in (2), so I think is a question of time.

Let me say, it’s now outstanding stable and creates great files.

Thank you for the hard work put into this,

[tompe]

Originally Posted by DDHarriman

1 - image of the eBook cover, shows in the Cybook, does not show in Mobipocket Reader for the Desktop and for the PokectPC;

When I had this problem with MobiPerl it was because I had not set the correct pointers in the MobiHeader.