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I've heard people complain about Calibre's EPUB conversion utility, but I've never seen anyone do a deep-dive to explain exactly why it's bad. Is it comparable

I've heard people complain about Calibre's EPUB conversion utility, but I've never seen anyone do a deep-dive to explain exactly why it's bad. Is it comparable to the HTML-soup that Microsoft Word spits out when you export a Word doc to HTML? FWIW, I still heed those warnings, and so I still hold on to the de-DRM'd AZW file even after I convert it to EPUB.

ses1984 7y ago
I don't know why it's bad, but I know the end result is poorly laid out. It's always super obvious I'm reading something passed through calibre conversion, because accent marks will be missing, intra chapter breaks will be missing, punctuation is messed up, etc.
- freddie_mercury 7y ago
  Er, pretty much by definition, when it does a good job you wouldn't know it had been passed through calibre conversion. So how do you count up those "successes" and measure them against the "failures" to determine whether, on a probabilistic kind of basis, it does a good or bad job?
  - ses1984 7y ago
    Good point, in my case I've only done about 10 books and I can remember each one, 100% converted wit obvious problems.
billfruit 7y ago
For me the most obvious mangling the converting process is doing is inconsistent paragraphing, some times a single paragraph in original splits into two at an arbitrary place after conversion, and vice versa, seriously disrupting the readability.
- harshreality 7y ago
  What format are you starting with? That doesn't happen if you start from a modern, flowed (kf8) format with proper markup. Calibre tends to preserve all markup. It might add some trivial css fixups in some cases, but usually that's only when tags it thinks are important have no associated css already. There are two reasons I can think of for why you'd get broken paragraph separation. First, the markup in the kindle version (if it's old style mobi, or really badly generated kf8) could be broken, so when calibre tries to split into multiple files to prevent single (x)html files from being too big, it can't tell where paragraphs are so it might split in the middle of a paragraph. Second, you might be converting a pdf or azw4 (essentially a pdf) to epub, in which case you'll get paragraph breaks across pages. You shouldn't convert those formats to epub without extensive editing.
  - billfruit 7y ago
    It was a long time ago, possible it was converting from azw4 files.

ses1984 7y ago

I don't know why it's bad, but I know the end result is poorly laid out. It's always super obvious I'm reading something passed through calibre conversion, because accent marks will be missing, intra chapter breaks will be missing, punctuation is messed up, etc.

freddie_mercury 7y ago
Er, pretty much by definition, when it does a good job you wouldn't know it had been passed through calibre conversion. So how do you count up those "successes" and measure them against the "failures" to determine whether, on a probabilistic kind of basis, it does a good or bad job?
- ses1984 7y ago
  Good point, in my case I've only done about 10 books and I can remember each one, 100% converted wit obvious problems.

billfruit 7y ago

For me the most obvious mangling the converting process is doing is inconsistent paragraphing, some times a single paragraph in original splits into two at an arbitrary place after conversion, and vice versa, seriously disrupting the readability.

harshreality 7y ago
What format are you starting with? That doesn't happen if you start from a modern, flowed (kf8) format with proper markup. Calibre tends to preserve all markup. It might add some trivial css fixups in some cases, but usually that's only when tags it thinks are important have no associated css already. There are two reasons I can think of for why you'd get broken paragraph separation. First, the markup in the kindle version (if it's old style mobi, or really badly generated kf8) could be broken, so when calibre tries to split into multiple files to prevent single (x)html files from being too big, it can't tell where paragraphs are so it might split in the middle of a paragraph. Second, you might be converting a pdf or azw4 (essentially a pdf) to epub, in which case you'll get paragraph breaks across pages. You shouldn't convert those formats to epub without extensive editing.
- billfruit 7y ago
  It was a long time ago, possible it was converting from azw4 files.