epu2html

Provides a utility for converting text format fanfiction from Eyrie Productions Unlimited (EPU) to xhtml, for use in ebooks.  An additional utility (buildepubcontainer.pl) is provided to build an ePub style ebook.

Makes a lot of inferences from the structure and spacing of the file, so it's not designed to be a general-purpose text-to-html translator.  But since Gryphon et al.'s files are pretty regular, it does a pretty good job that only requires a couple minutes or so of human intervention.  Since it's not a natural language parser or anything, it has to guess about the titles of the work and such.


Usage: perl epu2html.pl [-c##] [filenames]
 If more than one file is given, it will assume that the filenames are
 in the correct order and number them accordingly.

Options:
-c[number]  Sets the number of columns in the text file.
            Default is 70, which is pretty standard at EPU.
-o          Sends the output to STDOUT instead of a file.
-q          Suppress the summary text (quiet)
-utf8       Sets the text output as utf-8 instead of iso-8859-1


How to build an EPUB ebook in seven "easy" steps:
 0) This assumes you have a basic knowledge of HTML and CLI environments.
 1) Create a folder for an ebook and cd into it.
 2) Run this program with all of the text files you want to include, in order.
    Example:   perl ~/epu2html.pl first.txt second.txt last.txt
    If they're already in order, like this: perl epu2html.pl ../WOR/rmtn*.txt
 3) Look at the files in a web browser, and edit them where there's mistakes.
    The program will tell you where it put things with class "unknown", which
    means it got really confused there.  Other places to look:
    - Uncentered headers, typically in the front and end matter.  Let me know
      if you have an idea how to tell the difference between a short paragraph
      and a header that has 8 spaces in front of it algorithmically.
 4) Add a title page if you feel like it.  Name it something like 00title.html
    so it's put in the book first.  This could become automatic, eventually.
 5) Run buildepubcont.pl
    Example: perl buildepubcont.pl .  (that dot at the end is the current dir)
 6) Some files got created, you'll need to look at them.  Especially the
    titles, though the guesses are pretty good now.  Edit as necessary
    - yuri.opf
    - toc.ncx
    - kei.css (only if you want to customize CSS)
    Change any attributes that look wrong, like titles or authors.
 7) All good?  Ready to zip this up.
    Run: zip -r ../[book name].epub * -x \*.meta
    The metafiles aren't part of the final epub.
    You'll want to run zip from the inside the folder, so the paths aren't
    screwed up on the final product.

epu2html v0.1
by Brent Laabs, April 2012
Licensed under Creative Commons-Attribution License (CC BY 3.0).
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/