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# 2024-08-13 - EPUB2TXT, Convert EPUB To Plain Text On DOS |
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Recently I wrote an XML parser in AWK. |
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2024-08-01-xml2tsv |
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I let it loose into the black abyss of DOS. It came back with books |
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in a bag of holding. |
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Now i am announcing epub2txt.awk, a script to convert EPUB files to |
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plain text for reading on DOS. It it relies on a bunch of utilities |
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to do this conversion. The only one i modified was UTF8TOCP.COM from |
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FreeDOS. I changed it to decode unknown Unicode codepoints into |
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\uHHHH and \UHHHHHHHH formats instead of just '?'. |
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It takes patience because the script can run for a long time. |
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Once completed, it produces several outputs. |
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The plaintxt/ directory contains short 8.3 filenames for all of the |
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images used in the EPUB; index.txt is UTF-8 encoded; index.dos is |
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CP437 encoded, has hard wrapped paragraphs, and has ASCII-art |
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transliterations for some Unicode codepoints. |
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The plaintxt/ directory would be a good one to zip up for viewing |
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on any DOS machine. |
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index.html gives a table of contents to read the EPUB content in |
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a web browser. In FreeDOS i can view this with inline images by |
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running: |
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links -g -mode 1024x768x256 index.html |
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I tested epub2txt with nawk on FreeDOS 1.3 and MS-DOS 6.22. I tested |
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it with gawk, mawk, and nawk on Slackware 15. I advise running on |
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Unix if possible, then copying plaintxt over to DOS for viewing. |
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To download the DOS package: |
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gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/files/dos386/util/epub2txt/ |
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To view the source code: |
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https://chiselapp.com/user/bencollver/repository/epub2txt |
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See the directions in README.TXT and have fun! |
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* * * |
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I found a very similar project written in C. It is very fast. It |
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does not include references to images and external links. See link |
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below for code and details. |
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gopher://tilde.club/1/~freet/gophhub/?https://github.com/kevinboone/epub2txt2 |
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tags: bencollver,retrocomputing,technical |
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# Tags |
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bencollver |
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retrocomputing |
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technical |
