Can someone explain format options? Please evangelize FBReader to me...
Beagley
I was all set to install FBReader on my XO, when I saw the list of
support File Formats: http://www.fbreader.org/docs/formats.php
As near as I can tell, FBReader does not fully support ANY of the
ebook formats in which I own books.
I have books in: txt, rtf, doc, pdf, lrf, html, and of course .lit. (I
have a couple of Amazon books now, too, but I know it will be a long
time before those work on anything but a Kindle.)
According to the chart, NONE of these common formats are fully
supported or encouraged for FBReader use?
I am hungering for a really good e-reader program for my Mac and my
XO... is FBReader really it, and why? Am I really going to have to run
clit on all my .lit files, open them, copy, paste them into a text
editor, use find-and-replace to fix paragraphs, and then save as .txt?
Yikes!
1) I am very willing to listen to someone evangelize the benefits of
FBReader,
2) And I'm very eager for advice on a good format selection. What
format can I use that will result in a file that can still be read by
most text editors or computers thirty years from now?
3) Should I convert all of my books to .txt, with two carriage returns
between paragraphs? That would be a lot of work, but maybe that's what
I'm forced to endure for now?
-d
Marius Gedminas
> I was all set to install FBReader on my XO, when I saw the list of
> support File Formats: http://www.fbreader.org/docs/formats.php
>
> As near as I can tell, FBReader does not fully support ANY of the
> ebook formats in which I own books.
>
> I have books in: txt, rtf, doc, pdf, lrf, html, and of course .lit. (I
> have a couple of Amazon books now, too, but I know it will be a long
> time before those work on anything but a Kindle.)
txt, rtf, html usually work fine.
With .txt you have to tell FBReader some things (encoding, newline
style) because those aren't standartized and the .txt itself carries no
metadata.
Embedded images in .rtf files are ignored, and the text is often
left-aligned instead of being fully justified, so I prefer to open a
word processor and convert the .rtf to an HTML file.
Some HTML files have strange markup (e.g. <span style="font-style:
italic">text</span> instead of <i>text</i> or <em>text</em>) that
FBReader ignores.
It's easy to convert doc and lit to html, which then works fine.
Except that some .lit books have really weird HTML in them and get the
spacing wrong, e.g. "<p>Some text<em>emphasised</em> , like this.</p>".
I've no idea about lrf, except that it's a bad idea to get locked into
any particular proprietary format.
PDF is open, but it was not originally designed as a format for e-books,
and not all PDF files carry the additional information needed for
reflowing text paragraphs to suit the device screen size. I'm glad to
see PDF support is on the to-do list.
> According to the chart, NONE of these common formats are fully
> supported or encouraged for FBReader use?
*shrug*
HTML is my format of choice for FBReader. It's reasonably expressive
and reasonably simple to fix.
> I am hungering for a really good e-reader program for my Mac and my
> XO... is FBReader really it, and why?
Try it and see.
> Am I really going to have to run
> clit on all my .lit files, open them, copy, paste them into a text
> editor, use find-and-replace to fix paragraphs, and then save as .txt?
No. You're going to have to run clit on all your .lit files, period.
> 1) I am very willing to listen to someone evangelize the benefits of
> FBReader,
It's open source, it works great on a variety of platforms, it supports
many open formats. It's very customizable, which may be considered a
benefit or a disadvantage, depending on your point of view. FBReader
has the feel of many old-school open-source applications: it's powerful
and lets you achieve more, but you have to put some effort in learning
to use it. Not as much effort as, say, learning vi or emacs, so don't
be scared. :-)
> 2) And I'm very eager for advice on a good format selection. What
> format can I use that will result in a file that can still be read by
> most text editors or computers thirty years from now?
Plain ASCII text (the Gutenberg project chose this format for precisely
the reason you specified). Plain UTF-8 text. HTML. These are
reasonably simple, widely popular, and openly documented.
> 3) Should I convert all of my books to .txt, with two carriage returns
> between paragraphs? That would be a lot of work, but maybe that's what
> I'm forced to endure for now?
You would lose some formatting. There are books where italics are
important.
Marius Gedminas
--
This company has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If
the problem persists, contact your vendor or appeal to a higher court.
Al'eyx
Beagley <douglas...@gmail.com> a écrit :
>
> Hi,
> I was all set to install FBReader on my XO, when I saw the list of
> support File Formats: http://www.fbreader.org/docs/formats.php
>
> As near as I can tell, FBReader does not fully support ANY of the
> ebook formats in which I own books.
Of course not. Most formats are too complex to ever be 'fully
supported' by anyone but the ones who wrote it in the first place. And
even then, there's usually a lot of blanks.
(Ironically, .txt is the opposite: it's so raw that it can be a pain to
properly handle...)
No, the real question here is: is format X supported well enough to be
readable? Does FBReader really need to fully support HTML forms
or .doc history of modifications? (okay, so I'm joking here. Still,
my point stands.)
>
> I have books in: txt, rtf, doc, pdf, lrf, html, and of course .lit. (I
> have a couple of Amazon books now, too, but I know it will be a long
> time before those work on anything but a Kindle.)
>
> According to the chart, NONE of these common formats are fully
> supported or encouraged for FBReader use?
I don't know about 'encouraged', but I've used FBReader on my n770 and
n800 for a long time, reading HTML mostly, and a little RTF. I've
been quite happy with that, and happier still with each version.
Sure, I'll be even more happy when FBReader will support the <hr />
tag, basic CSS (mostly for <p>, <div> and <span> class formatting), and
empty paragraphs for scene changes. But as it is, FBReader does
everything I want it to do.
You may want to convert your PDFs though. PDF is good at being
printed, or being manipulated before being printed, but on a screen
it's pretty pathetic compared to other, free-flow formats.
>
> I am hungering for a really good e-reader program for my Mac and my
> XO... is FBReader really it, and why?
Only one way to be sure: install it and try it out... I know, it
doesn't help much. But it'll only take you what, ten minutes?
For me, FBReader is 'it' on my Nokias, because as I said, it does
everything I want it to do. Basic formatting/styling, book management,
good use of screen real-estate on such 'small' devices.
Which is good, because, well, there's no competition...
> Am I really going to have to run
> clit on all my .lit files, open them, copy, paste them into a text
> editor, use find-and-replace to fix paragraphs, and then save as .txt?
> Yikes!
Nah. Clit already extracts in a directory, correct? (it's been a while
since I've seen it). Just zip that directory, and change the extension
to .oebzip. It should work.
I think.
Hm. I better try it myself.
And if one works, you can write a three-line lil' script that will
convert all of your .lit in one go, painlessly.
>
> 1) I am very willing to listen to someone evangelize the benefits of
> FBReader,
> 2) And I'm very eager for advice on a good format selection. What
> format can I use that will result in a file that can still be read by
> most text editors or computers thirty years from now?
HTML should do the trick. Or any other open SGML derivative, really.
I'm partial to XHTML+CSS myself, mostly because it's an XML format,
and so can easily be converted into other formats. YMMV.
N.
wa...@gate.net
installed FBReader and clit (which I had formerly used on another
device). It is really easy to use.
clit mbybook.lit mybook/
will create a a folder, mybook, with the text, indexes, illustrations,
etc. all inside it. Just point FBReader to the html file in that
folder and start reading. I just did so on a .lit file that I have
been reading on a Pocket PC, and apart from being more readable, it is
the same.
HTH
Walt
On Jan 14, 11:59 am, Beagley <douglas.beag...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
> I was all set to install FBReader on my XO, when I saw the list of
> support File Formats:http://www.fbreader.org/docs/formats.php
>
> As near as I can tell, FBReader does not fully support ANY of the
> ebook formats in which I own books.
>
> I have books in: txt, rtf, doc, pdf, lrf, html, and of course .lit. (I
> have a couple of Amazon books now, too, but I know it will be a long
> time before those work on anything but a Kindle.)
>
> According to the chart, NONE of these common formats are fully
> supported or encouraged for FBReader use?
>
> I am hungering for a really good e-reader program for my Mac and my
AlanW
FBReader at the .opf file, not the HTML. What Convert LIT "explodes"
a LIT to is an OEB e-book, and if you make a zip of all the files and
rename it .oebzip FBReader will recognize this is as an "OEB in zip"
file.
When given multiple format options (e.g. Baen or FictionWise) I choose
either MOBI (PRC) or LIT. The downside of LIT is that you have to
explode it to OEB, but the downside of MOBI is that the images are
often very small. Both work well.
If you have a Kindle, the only DRM-free format it really supports is
MOBI. So this might be a reason for standardizing on MOBI. The
mobiperl scripts converts various formats to MOBI and lit2mobi
maintains (most of) the size of the input images, see
http://www.ida.liu.se/~tompe/mobiperl/
Walt Scrivens
I haven't used the zip feature yet, I will try it :-)
walt