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ebooks/ #1

Open utterances-bot opened 3 years ago

utterances-bot commented 3 years ago

EBooks · Abhay Rana

https://captnemo.in/ebooks/

helphelpplease commented 3 years ago

Hello: What wonderful work your doing. Is there a title that you would recommend to teach someone how to create "perfect EPUB". Ive read several epub books, dabbled with sigil, but really wanted a step by step "perfect epub" receipe. The source of the content is viewed online in a secure website with no download ability. I prefer to read the title offline. Thankyou kindly for your time.

captn3m0 commented 3 years ago

pandoc is a great tool to get started. With just a few flags, you can write metadata in a XML file, set a cover, title etc very easily.

The input that I usually use to generate a HTML file first. Set your chapter headings with <h1>, and pandoc will generate a Table of Contents as well.

helphelpplease commented 3 years ago

Great. Pandoc. Thanks. Are there ePub perfect templates or style guides available? There are many ways to scrape the text from the Online book web page. How do you work out the best method to scrape -- to give best result in shortest timeframe? (Is it only thru trial and error, or are there any tips?).

most titles have all pages prelinked etc from contents, so is there a way to grab contents and all linked page eg a one click grab of ebook ?
Some titles have a different url per chapter. ePub.press can grab all pages that are in tab and compiles into basic ePub. How best to make this ePub a "perfect ePub"? Thankyou for your assistance.

captn3m0 commented 3 years ago

There isn't an objective best/easiest way, and I keep switching my toolkit, depending on what I'm wanting to experiment with.

Here's most of my usual toolkit, I can maybe blog about this sometime:

Downloading: wget --input-file, requests
Parsing: nokogiri, cheerio, BeautifulSoup, SimpleHTMLDOM, and pup
Readability: mozilla, article-parser
Final generation: Prefer [pandoc](), but make do with other libraries sometimes. paru is a good wrapper. wkhtml2pdf gives ugly output by default, but sometimes that's all that works.
Metadata: pandoc supports pushing metadata using --metadata metadata.xml for EPUBs. See W3C Specification and DublinCore Specs. I wrote a metadata generator that may help. For pdfs, see pdftk's update_info_utf8 method.

I look at StandardEbooks final EPUBs for inspiration, do see their style manual