Turning Fanfic into PDFs (and formats useable in ebook readers)

[annariel]

I promised lukadreaming a tutorial on converting fanfic into PDFs and other ebook formats using Calibre.

Step 1

Download Calibre. You can get Calibre from http://calibre-ebook.com/ and it installs pretty easily on a Mac (I can't speak for other operating systems, but I've not heard any complaints). The only slight oddity is that it unpacks as a folder and you have to drag the Calibre icon from that folder into your Applications folder.

Step 2

Save your chosen fanfic from the web (Safari's default save as "Page Source" option works fine here not sure about other web browsers or the "Save as HTML"). If I'm saving from livejournal I tend to set it to format=light, but I don't think that's actually necessary.

This is me viewing one of Fred's drabbles in format=light.

Step 3

Start up Calibre. Click on Add Books.

and add your saved file.


It should now appear in Calibre although all the information is empty or muddled up.

Step 4

Select the book you are interested in. Click on Convert Books.


You will probably want to edit the meta data to set the title and author correctly and add any tags you want and that kind of thing.



You also need to select the right output format

You may need to wait a bit while it does the conversion.

NB. Calibre let's you keep your book in multiple formats. The "ZIP" format below is the "Page Source" saved by Safari.

Step 5

Repeat with other fanfic, or more output formats. Calibre shows you which output formats you have the story saved as.

It comes with its own ebook reader so you can check the results on your computer before transferring the files to another device. It simply detects my ebook reader when I plug it in and gives me options for transferring books to it, but I can't speak for how it would integrate with other readrs.

Comments

[telperion-15.livejournal.com]

I hadn't quite clocked that Calibre would translate a saved webpage into a PDF. I wonder how it would do translating directly into MOBI for my Kindle though... I've already discovered that, when trying to translate some PDFs I already had into MOBI, that it's not foolproof when it comes to preserving the formatting...

[purplecat]

Hmm I've not really tried it on anything where the formatting was really crucial, and one of the reasons I've been saving as format=light is to minimize the chances of sidebars and so forth confusing the thing.

I've had a couple of translations that were very odd and would only let me view the first page of the document but none of those were from LJ (and one had an embedded YouTube video which I suspect was the culprit) and for some reason it refused point-blank to convert part 8 of the Devil's Crowl directly from the zip file to PDF and I had to go via a format called PMLZ. Seemed to work though and I notice my original download had saved without images so I wondered if there might have been error messages in the source that were confusing the PDF converter.

[telperion-15.livejournal.com]

I've been finding that when I've translated PDFs into MOBI, it'll randomly start inserting paragraph breaks where there should be one (sometimes in the middle of sentences!) - but when I check the original PDF there's no random break. I don't know a lot about these things, but I suspect something buried in the PDF file/formatting that's confusing the conversion...

[joereaves.livejournal.com]

I find mobipocket reader converts better from pdf to mobi.

edited because I got the name wrong.

[lukadreaming.livejournal.com]

Oh, brilliant! Thank you muchly!

[fififolle]

Woah! That's pretty neat. Straight from the webpage.
I have hardly used my mobipocket etc. but it's great to know this is possible.
Thanks!

[lsellersfic.livejournal.com]

I'm so bad at reading fanfic which is longer than about 1,000 words when it actually gets posted that the whole purchase of the ebook reader was basically motivated as a way to save that fanfic somewhere I was likely to read it. I pretty much checked I could do this before I spent the money.