Basic operation

This converter is capable of converting FB2, DOCX and RTF files into EPUB. To initiate conversion, drag-n-drop your file(s) into the "Documents" tab. Once conversion is complete you can drag-n-drop resulting EPUB to the desired destination.

To customize the conversion process you can specify additional fonts and CSS stylesheets. Those can be drag-n-dropped into "Resources" tab. Also, several conversion settings can be controlled from the "Settings" tab.

Font embedding

For font embedding to work, the converter must be able to find the fonts which are used in the document. Since converter is written in Java, it has limited knowledge of the system default font location. It looks in C:\windows\fonts and /Library/Fonts which should take care of most Windows and Mac computers. If your fonts are installed in a different location, you need to manually drag-n-drop them into "Resources" tab.

Fonts that ere embedded into the EPUB document have to be scrambled or "mangled" for legal reasons. There are two mangling algorithms available. IDPF algorithm is standard, but not yet widely supported (in 2009). Adobe algorithm is Adobe-specific, but it has been implemented in all Adobe-based applications and devices. The algorithm can be chosen using "Use Adobe font mangling" checkbox.

Usage with hand-held devices

It is possible to set up EPUBGen converter to copy converted EPUB files right on your hand-held device, as long as you can access its storage through the file system. EPUBGen takes a single command-line parameter with is the folder where documents, resources and settings are stored. You can create EPUBGen folder on your hand-held device, copy EPUBGen.jar there and invoke it from that folder like this:

java -jar EPUBGen.jar .

This way, converted documents will be written to Documents subfolder of EPUBGen folder.

Using CSS with FB2 files

Custom CSS stylesheet allows one to control most aspects of FB2-to-EPUB conversion. CSS stylesheet is simply a text file with .css extension. CSS syntax is simple and can be learned by example. Note that this converter supports only a small subset of CSS selectors (only element names and classes).

For example, the following stylesheet can be used to produce EPUB with Calibri font used as default and titles centered on the page:

body {
  font-family: 'Calibri';
}
title {
  text-align: center;
}

The following fb2 element names can be used in the stylesheet: a, annotation, body, cite, code, date, empty-line, epigraph, image, poem, stanza, sub, subtitle, sup, table, text-author, title, td, th, v.

The following classes have predefined meaning: .p (plain paragraph), .title-p (title paragraph), .title1-.title6 (title with a particular nesting level).

Reporting bugs

Bug reports are welcome and should be filed at the EPUBGen project web site: http://code.google.com/p/epub-tools/issues/list . Please provide problem files or explain how they can be obtained. Note that it is unrealistic for a small volunteer project like EPUBGen to implement all possible features in complex input formats like DOCX and EPUB. Therefore, some bugs will be marked "WontFix" and will probably never be fixed.

Why such a weird user interface?!

Some users find this user interface convenient, but its design is basically a joke and it violates all sort of accepted practices. In Russian e-book community several "single-button" converters are quite popular. "Single-button" label implies that the less buttons the better. Well, here you have a "buttonless" converter - so it got to be even better - right?