[SOLVED] Ebook --> something useful

business_kid · 03-21-2021, 10:52 AM

I have this 19th century book for reference in the form of an ebook. People are suggesting are suggesting crazy utilities slackware doesn't have. What's the lazy was of un-ebooking the thing?

shruggy · 03-21-2021, 11:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by business_kid

I have this 19th century book for reference in the form of an ebook.

Where?

What format is it in? EPUB? Then it's just a zip archive, full of XHTML, CSS, images and some metadata. Sigil is the main tool to work with EPUBs, and it's available in Slackware (Alien Bob, Slackonly).

Otherwise, you can probably convert it to EPUB with Calibre.

garpu · 03-21-2021, 11:21 AM

Calibre is awesome. On my phone I use FBReader, but it's qt4, which won't work with current. But if you want to read an ebook on desktop/laptop, definitely check out Calibre. There's a dugan slackbuild out there. Alien Bob has a package, too. I think ruario had one, as well?

business_kid · 03-21-2021, 11:38 AM

Thx for the speedy reply. I grabbed that from slackware.nl.

Code:

bash-5.1$ ldd /usr/bin/sigil |grep found
	libQtSvg.so.4 => not found
	libQtWebKit.so.4 => not found
	libQtXmlPatterns.so.4 => not found
	libQtGui.so.4 => not found
	libQtXml.so.4 => not found
	libQtNetwork.so.4 => not found
	libQtCore.so.4 => not found

It's wearisome. Apparently they're all part of Qt-4.8.7? Slackware is doing Qt5 now, isn't it?

giomat · 03-21-2021, 12:01 PM

Okular also can read epub files and comes with slackware

imitis · 03-21-2021, 12:09 PM

Have You tried Pandoc?

BradReed · 03-21-2021, 12:19 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shruggy

Where?

What format is it in? EPUB? Then it's just a zip archive, full of XHTML, CSS, images and some metadata. Sigil is the main tool to work with EPUBs, and it's available in Slackware (Alien Bob, Slackonly).

Otherwise, you can probably convert it to EPUB with Calibre.

Calibre's ebook-editor is probably better maintained than Sigil these days, but both are great tools.

kgha · 03-21-2021, 12:25 PM

Calibre handles most ebook formats (AZW3, EPUB, MOBI, FB2 and a few others) and you can convert to pdf or docx or txt if you find those file formats more convenient.
Personally, I find that the lazy way of handling ebooks is to read them as ebooks. For the EPUB format, EPubreader is a smooth plugin available for Firefox and chrome-based browsers

BTW, latest stable sigil version (1.4.3) builds fine with qt5 and the SBo buildscript. Just version-bump, and (due to changes in the source tree) edit line 97 in the buildscript to:

Code:

  install -D -m 0644 src/Resource_Files/icon/app_icons_orig/app_icon_${i}.png \

Don't forget the dependencies (and dependencies for dependencies), though.

business_kid · 03-21-2021, 02:46 PM

Thanks for all the suggestions

Calibre I had once. It kept trying to take over my world and giving me a hard time because I just wanted to read one epub.
Pandoc I never heard of
Okular I had once for pdfs but I felt it sucked. Perhaps that's because kde doesn't live here.
Alien's Sigil wants QT4. So I grabbed the git, added a DESTDIR variable and installed it. But my Sigil throws errors aplenty.

So I'll bite the bullet, install one of calibre or okular tomorrow and convert this. It's a boring tome by a guy I fundamentally disagree with but his research sources are comparable with mine, and therefore worth a look We're on the same page on his main point.

kaott · 03-21-2021, 03:15 PM

A somewhat minimal dependency epub reader is mupdf.

You might give that a try. There is a slackbuild http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.2/office/mupdf/ that I have used with success.

Slurker · 03-21-2021, 06:17 PM

Hope some bright fella would slackify this:

https://johnfactotum.github.io/foliate/

longus · 03-21-2021, 07:33 PM

Foliate seems interesting, but i am unable to compile it on 14.2.

Slurker · 03-21-2021, 07:48 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by longus

Foliate seems interesting, but i am unable to compile it on 14.2.

I'm using it in Debian and I really like it. Hope it'll be easy to run/install in 15

enorbet · 03-21-2021, 09:18 PM

BTW it isn't really hard to install old apps that haven't yet or wont ever be updated to QT5 by isolating them and their required dependency libraries in /opt. The main reason I keep around older systems is to be able to copy from them. There is a 32 bit KDE v3 app I use regularly that I use on Current updated as of yesterday. I'm thankful slackpkg+ clean system doesn't mess with /opt if it isn't in /var/log/packages.

business_kid · 03-22-2021, 09:33 AM

Let me bring this vaguely back on topic. Ebook--> Something Useful.

This is a newish day here. I installed okular, ran 'ldd |grep found' on it, and was met by an impressive list on 'don't have' items. I deemed it unlikely that kdelibs would have them all. As okular doesn't have conversion capabilities for epub, I decided to fight with calibre instead.

Calibre from Alien Bob was compiled against icu4c-65, whereas I had 68.2. I thought it was worth a shot symlinking my way out of that, but that failed. I happened to have icu4c-65.1 installed in last September's current, and copied some libraries into /usr/lib64 as required, but that bombed when one of the python scripts cried foul referencing, I gather libicuuc.so. My earliest iso was last September's which had icu4c-67.1

, so my cheating options were limited.

In the end, I opted for kaott's recommendation of mupdf which opened it, and allowed me to see it wasn't the boring 19th century tome I thought it was. So after all that fighting and farting about, my ebook is junk, and a problem to be solved with 'rm'.

So it's not really "Ebook--> Something Useful," it's "Ebook = junk."

Thanks to all who contributed their thoughts.