Tag: ebook

Calibre Quick Start Guide Fourth Edition

Posted on February 22, 2014

The quick start guide is something I’ve been neglecting for quite some time. When calibre 1.0 was released I really should have updated the guide at that time but I didn’t. This past week I decided that it had been long enough and the guide had to be updated. I’m... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Raised Initial

Posted on September 27, 2011

About Formatting Tips. This is a very easy formatting type and is similar to doing a drop cap. The big difference is a raised initial the letter is on the base line and is higher than the other letters. Only the first letter of the first paragraph of... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Endnotes and Footnotes

Posted on September 20, 2011

About Formatting tips. Many non-fiction books utilize footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes do not work very well with ebooks because footnotes need to be placed at the bottom of a page. It is possible with EPUB to specify content to be shown at the bottom of a page using the... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Sizing elements (Including Text)

Posted on September 13, 2011

About Formatting Tips. When dealing with the EPUB format there are number of ways to deal with sizes. Font size, indent, margin, spacing all allow for a variety of units to define their size. Sizes can be defined using any of the following: %, in, cm, mm, em, ex,... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Markdown, Textile and calibre

Posted on August 30, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Calibre as a First Step

Posted on August 23, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Calibre’s robust conversion engine can be leveraged to help with formatting tasks. Converting with calibre helps when you are dealing with a format you cannot easily edit, or a format you aren’t very familiar. It’s also helpful in situations where the insides of the file... Continue reading

Formatting Tip: Poetry

Posted on August 16, 2011

About Formatting Tips. Poetry is one of the hardest elements to get right when formatting an ebook. The biggest issue is poems visually use a fixed width. Each line needs to be easily distinguishable. If they run together the rhyming and meter can easily be thrown off. Ebooks typically... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Scene Breaks

Posted on August 9, 2011

About Formatting Tips. There are two types of scene breaks: hard and soft. Hard scene breaks are denoted by a visual separator between paragraphs. Typical identifiers are lines and stars. Soft scene breaks are created by putting white space between paragraphs. They both serve the same purpose but some... Continue reading

Formatting Tip: Big First Letter

Posted on August 2, 2011

About Formatting Tips. A common embellishment used in print books is to have the first letter of the first paragraph in a chapter appear much larger then the others. In addition to the letter being larger than the rest it also falls below the baseline. The rest of the... Continue reading

Formatting Tips: Print Style Paragraphs

Posted on July 29, 2011

About Formatting Tips. When creating an ebook using EPUB paragraphs default to looking like they do on a web page. Each paragraph is separated by a blank line and there is tab indent. It’s relatively easy to format your ebook to look like a printed book. The first paragraph... Continue reading

Calibre Weeks in Review

Posted on April 24, 2011

Once again this is a weeks in review instead of once. I’ve been focusing more on new features than blogging. Calibre 0.7.57 is out and is also the beta for 0.8. Adding the tweak “test_eight_code = True” will enable the 0.8 features. Get Books aka Stores For quite some time... Continue reading

Amazon APNX file format

Posted on February 9, 2011

Coming with the Kindle 3.1 firmware is the ability to have real page numbers. Getting ready for this Amazon has put out a preview release of the 3.1 firmware and has started adding the necessary information to Kindle books to show the page numbers. The page numbers themselves map to... Continue reading

EZReader Pocket Pro Review

Posted on December 29, 2009

Background My wife bought me an Astak EZ Reader Pocket Pro For Christmas this year. This device isn’t my first or even second ebook reader. It is now my third. The first a Sony PRS-505 having been commandeered by my wife. The second is a Cybook Gen 3 which... Continue reading

Calibre Week In Review

Posted on December 22, 2009

Not much on the calibre front for this past week from me. The only thing I’ve worked on was adding support to the Nook driver for the cover image to be sent to the device with the book. Also, if there is no cover associated with the book a default... Continue reading

Why User Replaceable Batteries Don't Matter

Posted on November 30, 2009

Robert B, who is Astak’s Director of Bus. Devl., posted a blog entry about user replaceable batteries. I mostly agree with him that they are a benefit to consumer electronics. I mostly agree because I don’t see them as a positive in every case. I posted the following... Continue reading

Unidecoder

Posted on October 31, 2009

A while back I made a post about ASCIIizing Text. With it was a simple python application that would convert Unicode characters to ASCII equivalents. It doesn’t do a basic conversion but also Latinizes the characters when they are outside of the ASCII range. The uni2ascii package I... Continue reading

Calibre Week in Review

Posted on October 19, 2009

Like every week there were miscellaneous bug fixes. However, this week I did a bit more. TCR input and output. Do be warned that the output supports multiple compression levels; the higher levels being slower than the lower. For instance a 200K TXT file as input will take around 25... Continue reading

Calibre Week in Review

Posted on October 11, 2009

I haven’t had one of these for quite some time. I’ve been working on other projects and on the calibre font I’ve only dealing with small bug fixes. However, this past week I’ve done a bit of work that is worth mentioning. I’ve cleaned up the FB2 output. It fixes... Continue reading

Calibre Two Weeks in Review

Posted on August 2, 2009

This time I missed last weeks week in review because I simply forgot. I’m hoping to keep this to a minimum in the future. The big news is calibre 0.6 has been released. Kovid is now back to his regular (weekly at the least) bug fix releases too. As of... Continue reading

ASCIIize Text

Posted on July 24, 2009

One pet peeve of I have with my Cybook Gen 3 is its inability to properly display unicode characters in plain text files. I don’t need anything fancy like Japanese characters just simple things like “ and ” (as opposed to “ and “). To solve this problem I’ve been... Continue reading

Calibre Week in Review

Posted on June 6, 2009

This week hasn’t seen very much in the way of new features from me. I’ve only added one. This is mainly because I’ve been doing small bug fixes leading up to the beta for 0.6. The new feature, which Kovid helped me to implement, is ejecting the reader from within... Continue reading

Changing Single Quotation Marks to Double in eBooks

Posted on May 12, 2009

As a person living in the USA I highly prefer double quotation marks to single quotes when denoting speech. Some authors use the single quote for effect but mostly it’s just a style choice. I find UK authors generally use the two interchangeably. Tolkien books are a good example. I... Continue reading

Calibre Week in Review

Posted on April 18, 2009

This has been a busy week for me on the Calibre front. All of my changes were to pluginize and the first three I talk about also made it into trunk and will be appearing in the next release. I re-worked the mobi metadata reader so that it does not... Continue reading

Calibre work

Posted on March 21, 2009

I’ve been working on a few new features for Calibre recently. They will appear once pluginize is turned into trunk. All of the recent features that I though were going to be part of the 0.5 release are currently in pluginize. I was under the impression that pluginize was going... Continue reading

Printing Support and PDF Conversion in Calibre 0.5

Posted on February 20, 2009

Support for printing will in fact be coming in version 0.5. I’ve committed (to my branch) a new printing framework that fixes the bugs in the old one. Also, I’ve committed some PDF changes. There is now an any2pdf app which will allow for conversion of any supported ebook format... Continue reading

Cybook t2b Format Specification

Posted on January 19, 2009

The Cybook Gen 3 uses it’s own image file for thumbnails. The t2b file is generated by the device based upon the image found in the ebook. If there is no image a default one with the file name written across it is created. One of the feature request for... Continue reading

Calibre and Cybook

Posted on January 17, 2009

The usbms driver is mostly done. Everything is implemented and it works. Testing is all that’s needed now. The Cybook is working and Kindle support should be committed soon. Continue reading

Calibre and New Driver Code

Posted on January 7, 2009

This Christmas Santa was very nice to me. He gave me a Cybook Gen 3 ebook reader. I’ve really been needing a new one since Tati has been monopolizing (this isn’t a bad thing) the Sony Prs505 we already had. Sadly the ebook management application I often use (Calibre) didn’t... Continue reading

Multiple Input with Single Input Apps

Posted on December 24, 2008

The few eBook formatting tools I’ve posted all share one major flaw. They can only handle a single file as input. This is a problem when you want to run it on all or a number of different eBooks. If you are able to use Bash there is a simple... Continue reading

Building the eBook Tools

Posted on December 23, 2008

It’s come to my attention that while I’ve posted a few eBook formatting tools I wrote and use I never posted how to build them. Since I’m using Qt the easiest way to build them is to use qmake and make. The build process is simple.... Continue reading

eBook Adding Empty Lines At End of File

Posted on December 22, 2008

Continuing my work to clean up my eBooks I’ve written another little tool to help. I like for my eBooks to have two blank lines at the end of the file. The only major caveat of this one is it assumes Unix end of lines. Meaning a single n character.... Continue reading

eBook Paragraph Formating

Posted on December 21, 2008

Today I wrote two simple programs to help me clean up my ebooks. I prefer to keep my ebook collection as plain text files with paragraphs separated by a blank line. The first program reflows the paragraphs to put each on a single line. The second removes extraneous whitespace from... Continue reading

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