=============== Ebook converter

This is an impudent ripoff of the bits from Calibre project_, and is aimed only for converter thing.

My motivation is to have only the converter for ebooks run from the commandline, without all of those bells and whistles Calibre has, and with cleanest more pythonic approach.

Requirements

To build and run ebook converter, you'll need:

• Python 3.10 or newer
• Liberation fonts_
• setuptools
• pdftohtml, pdfinfo and pdftoppm from poppler_ project for conversion from PDF available in $PATH
• libxml2-dev and libxslt-dev as dependencies for format manipulation from some of the Calibre code

and several Python packages:

• beautifulsoup4_
• css-parser_
• filelock_
• html2text_
• html5-parser_
• msgpack_
• odfpy_
• pillow_
• python-dateutil_
• setuptools_
• tinycss_

No Python2 support. Even if Calibre probably still is able to run on Python2, I do not have an intention to support it.

What's supported

To be able to perform some optimization and make the converter more reliable and easy to use, first I need to remove some of the features, which are totally not crucial in my opinion, although they might be re-added later, like, for instance there is no automatic language translations depending on the locale settings.

First of all, I'm in the process of getting rid of strongly coupled things to QT libraries, and GUI code as well. Second, I'll try to minimize all modifications from third parties (external modules copied into Calibre project for instance), and make a huge cleanup. I'm not sure if I find time and strength for doing it completely, but I'll try.

Windows is not currently supported, because of the original spaghetti code. This may change in the future, after cleanup of mentioned pasta would be completed.

So called Kindle periodical format (which Amazon has_ killed_ anyway back in September 2023) is not supported, since all we do care are local files. If there would be downloaded periodical thing (using Calibre for example), it would be treated as common book.

Input formats

Currently, I've tested the following input formats:

- Microsoft Word 2007 and up (``docx``)
- EPUB, both v2 and v3 (``epub``)
- LibreOffice (``odt``)
- Pure text files (``txt``)
- Several PalmOS (``pdb``) readers support:

  - Plucker
  - Adobe Reader for PalmOS
  - eReader various formats
  - Weasel Reader
  - Haodoo Reader

- Rich Text Format (``rtf``)
- Mobipocket (``mobi``)
- Kindle (``azw3``, ``azw4``, …)
- FictionBook (``fb2``)
- Hyper Text Markup Language (``html``)
- Adobe Portable Document Format (``pdf``)
- Broadband eBooks (shortened as BBeB) (``lrf``)

Note, that old Microsoft doc format is not supported, although old documents
can be fairly easy converted using text processors programs, like Microsoft
Word or LibreOffice to supported formats.


Output formats

Currently, following formats are supported:

• Broadband eBooks (shortened as BBeB) (lrf)
• EPUB v2 (epub)
• Mobipocket (mobi)
• Microsoft Word (docx)
• zipped HTML file with additional assets, like images (htmlz)
• Text (txt)

Installation

Ebook converter is somewhere in between in alpha and beta stage, therefore I didn't place it on pypi_ yet.

Preferred way for installation is to use virtualenv (or any other virtualenv managers), i.e:

.. code:: shell-session

$python -m venv venv$ . venv/bin/activate (venv) $git clone https://github.com/gryf/ebook-converter (venv)$ cd ebook-converter (venv) $ pip install --no-binary lxml .

Simple as that. And from now on, you can issue converter:

.. code:: shell-session

(venv) $ ebook-converter book.docx book.lrf

.. note:: The --no-binary lxml flag is required to ensure lxml is compiled against the same system libxml2 as html5-parser. Without it, pip may install a pre-built lxml wheel bundling a different libxml2 version, which causes a RuntimeError.

License

This work is licensed on GPL3 license, like the original work. See LICENSE file for details.

.. _Calibre project: https://calibre-ebook.com/ .. _pypi: https://pypi.python.org .. _Liberation fonts: https://github.com/liberationfonts/liberation-fonts .. _Amazon has: https://goodereader.com/blog/kindle/amazon-will-discontinue-newspaper-and-magazine-subscriptions-in-september .. _killed: https://www.theverge.com/23861370/amazon-kindle-periodicals-unlimited-ended .. _poppler: https://poppler.freedesktop.org/ .. _beautifulsoup4: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup .. _css-parser: https://github.com/ebook-utils/css-parser .. _filelock: https://github.com/tox-dev/py-filelock .. _html2text: https://github.com/Alir3z4/html2text .. _html5-parser: https://html5-parser.readthedocs.io .. _msgpack: https://msgpack.org .. _odfpy: https://github.com/eea/odfpy .. _pillow: https://python-pillow.github.io .. _python-dateutil: https://github.com/dateutil/dateutil .. _setuptools: https://setuptools.pypa.io .. _tinycss: http://tinycss.readthedocs.io