this post was submitted on 15 Nov 2024
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[–] Piment@hexbear.net 24 points 2 days ago (2 children)
[–] Parsani@hexbear.net 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Yeah this is what I use, it works well. But now that zotero can handle epubs, I hope I never have to do it again.

[–] RedWizard@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago

Second this, it's very good.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 6 points 2 days ago (3 children)
[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Right?

Occasionally I've been known to make epubs out of PDFs. It's painstaking work and it takes hours to comb through each page manually when doing this. (There's a few on LibGen of my work like Blood In My Eye by George Jackson and Dimitrov's Selected Speeches, from the publishing date prior to this work being heavily edited in the post-Stalin era.)

The thought of someone undoing all that work almost makes me want to cry lol.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Exactly the reason why I'm asking, I make epubs too.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

For real!? There are literally dozens of us!! possum-party

I never figured out how to make a ToC for my epubs because I couldn't brain it out. Not a big deal but I guess it's kind of a shame.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

What program do you use to make them? And ToC in-page or ""built in"" to the epub?

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I use ABBYY uhh... idk the rest of the name of the app and I haven't installed it since I transitioned over to Linux so I can't find it rn.

I'm not even sure what the difference is between ToCs. I figure it's just a nice thing to have links out to the chapters within the epub at the start. If you feel like explaining the difference I'd be the most willing audience.

[–] Edie@hexbear.net 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

There are inline tocs, and toc files (EPUBs are just ZIP files with a different name and a file which defines where all the other files are in the zip). ToC files are used by readers when the user asks for the ToC (e.g. right clicking in calibre and clicking on Table of Contents). Whereas inline is like in printed book, where it will show up on one of the pages.

I haven't used ABBYY so I don't know how to do it in that. But Calibre (which I do use) has an easy "Insert inline ToC", which will take the toc file and insert it as a list

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago

Legendary! I'm gonna have to come back that this and follow the steps when my brain isn't doodoo.

[–] dannoffs@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I could potentially see doing it for printing but I genuinely can't think of any other reason.

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In case you ever find anyone who's doing this, comrade Rightenberg has written a program for turning PDFs into home-printed books/pamphlets here:

https://rail5.org/bookthief.html

Never used it but I trust the guy - he wrote his own damn programs so he could narrate audiobooks from printed material.

Spread the word if it ever comes up in future.

[–] iie@hexbear.net 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

probably downloaded a book from libgen that was only available as an epub

[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 2 points 1 day ago

Yes but why would he want it in the worst document format on earth?

[–] RNAi@hexbear.net 5 points 2 days ago

Screenshots

[–] ReadFanon@hexbear.net 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

It's been a long time since I've used this tool but it used to be very good:

https://www.ilovepdf.com.cn/en/convert/epub-to-pdf/

Can't say for sure that it's still good but if you want to do it once without installing a program and fiddling around with all the settings then that should probably work just fine.

Otherwise calibre offers a very feature rich ebook conversion tool but goddamn do I only understand half of the functions in that app. Still it's by far the most powerful and feature rich app for ebooks.