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ePubGen offers conversion from RTF, Word and FB2: New open source tool
April 29, 2009 | 8:13 am
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By David Rothman
“EPUBGen is a project that Peter Sorotokin has started—it’s a conversion utility for rtf files, word files, and FictionBook files. The output in each case is, of course, epub. The project is open source, and available for download.” – Adobe Digital Editions blog post.
Key detail: “Note that there is also a .jar file for rtf2epub and it should work, but the main intent of this project is to provide source code and examples of the way things could be done. In other words, there’s plenty of room for developers to improve and enhance the conversion.”
The TeleRead take: So, gang, what do you think? How well does the output quality currently stack up against alternatives, and what most needs to be done? Meanwhile kudos to Adobe and Peter for offering people open source alternatives that others can build on. Hint, hint, Amazon. Will you let Lexcycle programmers undertake similar projects, as well as contribute to standards work with general interests in mind, not just Amazon’s? And will this go on permanently, not just to counter skeptics? My mind’s open.
(Via prsync.)
Technorati Tags: ePubGen
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Comments:
It’s got a logo! Interestingly, the capitalization on it does not match the official one.
@igorsk. Liza Daly of Threepress is apparently the one who created the epub-tools code.google project, and all the Threepress materials use “ePub.” In the blog post Mr. Norton calls it EPUBGen, so at least everyone’s being consistent
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The font sub-setting stuff looks quite interesting.
Calibre currently supports the conversion of more formats — it’s also FOSS. It is a library manager for ebooks that allows you to manage and change ebook meta-data and send books to many popular brands of ereaders. The web site is:
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/wiki
and the formats that it will convert to epub include:
MOBI, LIT, PRC, EPUB, ODT, FB2, HTML, CBR, CBZ, RTF, TXT, PDF, LRS
It also converts to mobi (Kindle compatible) and LRF (Sony compatible). This allows you to get books from many sources and get them to your current devices and eventually your future device (ie, epub in the future). Of course, the big fly in the ointment is DRM. This approach requires a DRM-free source to convert from.
One nice feature of Calibre, is that it lets you set meta-information across a bunch of books at once. For example, some of my Baen books weren’t showing the author names on my Kindle. I could select a batch from the same author and set the author for all of the books at the same time.
Michael
The logo is indeed mine, and there are several variations, all in the public domain: http://threepress.org/epub/logos