re: ePub to MOBI conversion

[Robert Nagle <idiotprogrammer@gmail.com>]

Richard,

My knowledge about mobipocket and docbook is almost a year old, so I
don't know about any  Kindlegen improvements.

But I seem to recall seeing on the #eprdctn twitter feed that Calibre
conversions weren't accepted by Amazon. I might be incorrect or maybe
it has been updated since then.

(I know Jason Zech had some good experiences with Calibre to Mobi.
Maybe he knows if Calibre can be used for kindlegen/kindlepreviewer.

I'm assuming that your problems are on the mobipocket side and not on
the KF8 side.

I had to do profiling to output mobi-friendly code. Even with that, I
ended up  doing the title page and table of contents HTML by hand.
Much easier.

Sometimes I did profiling to change attributes and value (i.e., <p
width="50">. ) what a pain. Bob walked me through doing this here:
https://lists.oasis-open.org/archives/docbook-apps/201108/msg00091.html

Also, indices totally didn't work in Mobipocket. Not even close for
me. (I can't remember if Bob updated that code, but I doubt it would
have made indices work in the older mobipocket code).

I wrote some templates to get images to work passably well in the old
mobipocket format, but it was still a bit of a struggle. (and captions
didn't work very well).

I assume that KF8 solved most of these problems, and that media
queries will let you deal with the older and newer format.

I did a fairly complex ebook last year in docbook to produce
mobipocket. Then again, I had no images really and it was not very
structured.

I wrote some notes about converting docbook to mobi here
http://www.imaginaryplanet.net/weblogs/idiotprogrammer/2010/11/ebookepub-production-secrets-tips-tricks/

One tip I found recently was about how to make the older mobi to
handle multiple indents
http://www.pigsgourdsandwikis.com/2012/02/multiple-indents.html

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the subject.


-- 
Robert Nagle
6121 Winsome Ln #56C, Houston TX 77057-5581
(H) 713 893 3424/ (W) 832-251-7522 Carbon Neutral Since Jan 2010
http://www.robertnagle.info


 Forwarded message ----------
From: Richard L Hamilton <dick@rlhamilton.net>
To: DocBook Apps <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
Cc:
Date: Wed, 15 Aug 2012 09:38:23 -0700
Subject: ePub to MOBI conversion
At different times I've used kindlegen and calibre for ePub to MOBI
conversion, with varying results, but I've never been 100% happy with
the result from either.

Does anyone on the list have any suggestions as to which of these (or
which alternative) is the best choice for conversion when the ePub was
generated using the DocBook stylesheets?

Thanks,
Dick Hamilton
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