From Scribus to Kindle e-book

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Ganymedes

I have tried to search a solution, but everything I have found is rather old or inconclusive.

Is there a way to get from Scribus to Amazon Kindle e-books? I have everything ready in Scribus, exported PDF is just fine and even Amazon Paperback is fine.

Possibly the way would be via EPUB - don't know for sure.

I'm using Ubuntu Studio, Scribus version is 15.5. and there is an EPUB-editor in Ubuntu Studio.

All the attempts to read exported PDF to something else, results "ti" and "tt" characters to turn into blocks. Don't know, if this relevant as such since the way might be through images. However, with Kindle Paperback import, PDF worked just fine.

dragonfly



Ganymedes

Thanks for the tip again!

Actually, Calibre is included in Ubuntu Studio (latest version 20.04 in use). Interactive converting has many options, but I couldn't get it to work. The original problem with "tt" and "ti" (possibly something else) does not convert into characters, but are empty in the outputted EPUB.

I tried to exclude all the fonts, which I couldn't embedd, but that didn't help. I also tried to exclude all the random use of fonts and thus being outputted into PDF, but nothing really worked. My PDF was also worked with Adobe Tools (not freeware), but there was no joy.

I'm kind of leaning to the possibility that certain fonts "just don't work" - which would mean that I need to find other fonts - which is just some work, but possible. If that don't work, not sure what could be done.

Any comments on these matters?

Nermander

The best solution is to work in the other direction.

Create the contents for the e-book in Calibre, then import the contents into Scribus for print layout.

The problem you are having is the support for ligatures.

I did a quick google search and found this:

Quote--keep-ligatures

    Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

Source: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html

It seems the defaul option would convert them to separate characters, by maybe you have set an option to keep ligatures?

Ganymedes

Quote from: Nermander on March 12, 2021, 03:53:48 PM
The best solution is to work in the other direction.

Create the contents for the e-book in Calibre, then import the contents into Scribus for print layout.

The problem you are having is the support for ligatures.

I did a quick google search and found this:

Quote--keep-ligatures

    Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

Source: https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/generated/en/ebook-convert.html

It seems the defaul option would convert them to separate characters, by maybe you have set an option to keep ligatures?

Thanks for the comments. I really appreciate the answer. However, unfortunately, the answer is no joy in both ways.

a)
I already have several print layouts. One of them was OK for Amazon Paperback, no problems. That is the same that I am testing now.

b)
It is not about "ff", "fi" and that sort of things. I tried with an other test material and could find that problem there. I did try what you suggested, among something else in Calibre and that didn't do anything. Putting that aside, this was test material only and thus not really relevant.

"tt" and "ti" is not about ligeratures - or so they say. I still tried that in Calibre and as you state, by default it should work anyway, if that is the problem. I couldn't get any other way, there are many options in Calibre, to work either.

BUT:

I have two things in mind:

- install the very latest Calibre (and not used Ubuntu Studio default, which is a rather new version and the latest LTS, 20.04.x)

- change the font

Is it really possible that some font can be so screwed up? It is strange that the other document has "tt" problems and the other "ff" problems - that kind of leads to think that it is not a font problem ... but I need to double-check the logic in this.

utnik

hi ganymedes

Quote from: Ganymedes on March 15, 2021, 12:27:20 PM..."tt" and "ti" is not about ligeratures - or so they say.

sometimes it is.
at least one of the microsoft standard fonts ('calibri') supports ligatures for 'ti', 'tt' and 'tti'.

if you don't have the text without ligatures, i would replace them before going to 'calibre'.

utnik

Ganymedes

Thank you utnik!

It helps to get a confirmation like this.

Ganymedes

The latest advice - changing the font - did work out. Now the text itself comes out right into Calibre and conversion to EPUB as well.

However, this Calibre conversion messes up picture text location, creates a mysterious cover page from the first PDF page as an image and adds page numbers, which do not follow the flow of the e-book ... because they are the paperback page number locations. I think all of that is wrong - possibly it could be made right by conversion options.

Having said that - if I read now the exported PDF (from Scribus) into Amazon e-book directly - against the recommendation and warning about PDFs not possibly working - none of the problems are present that I laid out for Calibre.

So, the solution appears to be to change the font AND not use Calibre and .pub format in between ... just use the Scribus PDF. Not sure whether this is my end conclusion, but this is how it seems after initial testing.

The fonts that DO work, are OpenFormat -fonts and PostScript fonts. TrueType fonts, like Calibre, are giving the problems. This is perhaps against expectations.

I wish that Scribus would control ALL THE FONTS separately that can be used in a book. So that you would KNOW where every particular font comes from. Now, you have no idea because every application install and uninstall can change the fonts. Every operating system upgrade can change the fonts. It is even worse if you use Linux and Windows in turns - on Windows, you cannot possibly know where its fonts come from, because you have a bunch of applications that add to the fonts. When I moved from Windows to Ubuntu Studio, it was really difficult, because I had mistakenly used fonts that were Windows-application specific and do NOT appear on Linux. Thus, I would like to have ONLY those fonts that appear in Scribus itself ... then I could add to that in an controlled manner. Then the fonts would also be portable to some other computer running a different operating system, like win10, kubuntu, garudo or whatever.

In principle this is Reference Data -concept - all the data that an application output is based on, is managed separately with the application data itself (=the book in this case). You would archieve Reference Data (=fonts) together with the actual data (=the book).

This could be enchanged to all the other metadata as well, like Styles - but I guess with copy/export/import between documents you can achieve much of the same, but ideally, you would have unique Styles in a library and you could reference those in many documents.