I’m even starting to learn Python now, after all those technical discussions you had here leaving me wanting to understand more about all this new programming languages (I was once a profissional programmer, but with some old languages like Cobol, Pascal and Fortran – I know some VB and C++, but I want to “modernize” myself )

so, thanks again for all the work on this tool!

The Calibre ebook-convert routines simply converts pml to html (Calibre’s intermediate form) and then from html to epub (or whatever version you want). Unfortunately, it makes html code that is very very hard to read at times and does not gracefully handle table of contents and the like, so you end up with epub files that are sub-optimal.

So even though you use something like Dropbook and then Calibre, all you are really doing is converting the exact same pml to html inside a python script inside of Calibre and then html to whatever other format you want.

I would much rather skip Calibre completely (which is way overkill for doing html to epub conversions), and use Sigil to convert html to epub.

It simply does a better job os slicing the html into correct portions, creating a better table of contents, etc, without all of the overhead of
Calibre.

As for long-term archiving, I would much rather have an html version than a pml version. They way you use it, ereader2html is really DeDRMereader but for me archiving pml is not a long term option.

Therefore, I would like a much better pml to html converter and that is what I tried to do above.

My 2 cents …

However, I’m not sure that it’s worth spending much more time on the html conversion part of the script. It’s simple (from 0.06 on) to create an unencrypted eReader file from the output using DropBook, and then do any necessary conversions using that file through Calibre.

I don’t mean to be negative about improvements to the script, but might it be more use to more people to spend the time on improving the Calibre eReader import routines?

http://pastebin.de/1362

This is a trial version 0.09

This one tries to improve support for pml to html conversion by borrowing from calibre’s pml to html conversion approach as a starting point

- uses appropriate xhtml tag pairs everyplace

- replaces deprecated html with css pieces

- adds an internal only pseudo tag \h to handle the case where the \t tag is used to generate hanging indents

- properly handles the remaining \t tags which do block indents

- uses html comments to mark ChapterTitle Starts which makes it easy to generate Tables of Contents using Sigil especially when the toc entries are not found by Sigil automatically

Pretty much everything is reasonably handled except for:

- the \T=”40%” tags which are really tab stops that can not be easily incorporated into html without setting up tables of some sort (which are not supported by most ebook readers)

- the normal and standard fonts tags

If I understand things correctly, you have purchased a DRM protected ebook in mobi AKA prc or mobipocket format. If this is the case then the ebook was encrypted with a PID that was previously registered with the ebook vendor. mobiDeDRM should work with the PID registered with that vendor. The PID associated with your Kindle is irrelevant and in fact, mobiDeDRM will report back to you that your Kindle PID entered into the script in incorrect.

I think you mentioned in one of your earlier posts that you have the MobiPocker reader installed. I’ll bet the PID associated with your instance of that program is the one that should be entered into mobiDeDRM.

Again, referencing an earlier post, the double quote markes surrounding the PID won’t hurt but should not be necessary unless you have some special characters that are meaninful to DOS