Quick hi

[doranwen]

Just discovered this community--I'm surprised I didn't look sooner. I've already gotten involved in fanfiction conversion after getting an Astak EZ Reader Pocket Pro *last* summer. It handles epub best, so I started asking one of my older fanfic communities (Lois & Clark) if it would be possible to offer fics in epub and not just txt like their

Comments

[doranwen]

Yeah, I use Epubreader on Firefox when I need to read an epub, but I find it less fluid and user-friendly (what's with the extra tab opening?) and pretty (I don't like the chapter link font look) than a pdf--I don't tend to skip around chapters when I read a story, so I don't need the chapter breaks as much. But if I had to choose only one format, I'd go for epub for a fanfic, just because it's more compatible everywhere and I like how it looks on the EZ Reader.

Ugh, I don't count it as supporting doc at all, really. I only use the txt for my song lyric collection. I haven't had too many complaints about the HTML though--I don't notice the hyphens as much. The biggest problem has been the file size--I've read some seriously huge fanfics from ff.n that way and the frequent exit fic, start fic back up in order for it to handle the paging (it actually can't see all the total pages in the fic at start because they're so big) is frustrating.

If you know how to work with Sigil, an epub can have just as good a TOC as a pdf, I think. I don't care about cover art at all for fanfics (since most authors never do art anyway--Minisinoo in X-Men is one exception I can think of), and epubs can handle tables and stuff too, if you can handle mucking in the xhtml. (Not my thing, but I could learn it since I can do basic HTML anyway.) But they do require more knowledge to implement some of those features, that is true. (I hardly touch Calibre--it seems to want to "take over" everything and I don't like that--I store my fics where I want to and don't like their blatant "we're going to put your files how we want to" attitude. I use it for conversions from formats I can't read at all, period.)

[elfwreck]

An ePub can have just as good a TOC as a PDF (possibly better, on some readers), but I'm fluent in PDF and not in ePub. Making a TOC for a PDF is a matter of seconds for me; making one in ePub involves figuring out settings I don't yet understand. (I gather it's not difficult; it's just something I don't know. I've been adding bookmarks to PDFs for over 10 years; I can almost do it in my sleep.)

I'm with you on the xhmtl... could learn; haven't bothered yet. (And while ePub supports tables, and I think mobi has some basic version of them, Smashwords doesn't. Sigh. Their Meatgrinder doesn't have a way to deal with xhtml directly; they convert from Word, which means tables would be GAAH all over the place so they just settle on "we don't support tables," which means they have to be images. Grr.)

I intend to re-install Calibre someday and figure out how to assign it a folder-spot that says CALIBRE-DONT-TOUCH (or probably just "CalibreLibr") so I leave it alone and it doesn't clutter up the My Documents folder. I spend too much time poking around through an explorer window to deal with dozens of author folders I'm not supposed to touch. I don't mind that it makes 'DO NOT TOUCH THIS' folders; I mind that it mixes them in with my normal stuff.