dteviot

Github hosted website for my projects

View My GitHub Profile

WebToEpub Frequently Asked Questions

How to select a sub-range of URLs to include in an EPUB?

  1. Make sure all the URLs you want in the EPUB are selected. (Easiest way to do this is click on the “Select All” button, which will select ALL URLs.)
  2. Click on the “Edit Chapter URLs” button.
  3. A text editor with a list of hyperlinks, one hyperlink for each selected URL will open. Each hyperlink looks like this: 
    <a href="URL_TO_DOWNLOAD">Title</a>

    Where href is the URL to obtain a chapter to put in the EPUB, and “Title” is the title that will be given to the chapter in the table of contents. The chapters will be placed in the EPUB in the same order they appear on this page.

  4. Edit the hyperlinks. e.g. Delete the URLs that are not wanted. You can also change the order of the hyperlinks or their titles. Note, you may find it easier to copy/paste the hyperlinks into a text editor to modify them, then paste back the edited list.
  5. Click the “Apply Changes” button.

How to see file downloading progress?

WebToEpub’s display of progress in downloading the requested URLs is limited.
To obtain a much more detailed and more frequently updated download progress update, you can use the Network Monitoring facilities built into Chrome and Firefox. The basic procedure is:

  1. Open the respective developer tools.
  2. On the Developer tools pane, select the networking tab.
  3. Click WebToEpub’s “Pack EPUB” button.

For more detailed instructions, try the following links

Using Baka-Tsuki "Series Page" parser?

When originally created, WebToEpub only worked for “Full Text” web pages. That is, web pages that had the Full Text of a volume. e.g. https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Shinmai_Maou_no_Keiyakusha:Volume_7. In version 0.0.0.43, I’ve added a new parser that will work with “Series Pages” that show all the volumes in a series. e.g. https://www.baka-tsuki.org/project/index.php?title=Shinmai_Maou_no_Keiyakusha. However, there is a problem. I’ve not been able to discover a reliable way for WebToEpub to distinguish between the two page types.

So, by default WebToEpub will use the old “Full Text” parser when it encounters a Baka-Tsuki web page. However, if you browse to a Baka-Tsuki series page, you can use the “Manually Select Parser” drop down control under “Advanced Options” and select the “Baka-Tsuki Series Page” parser.

Alternately, you can check the “Automatic parser select includes Baka-Tsuki Series Page Parser”.option. When checked, WebToEpub will make a “best guess” at which of the two Baka-Tsuki parsers should be used for the currently selected Baka-Tsuki page. However, it won’t always pick the correct parser. When this happens, you will need to manually select the correct parser.

How to write a new Parser?

If you have basic knowledge of JavaScript and HTML then creating a new parser for a site that WebToEpub can’t currently handle may be as short as 10 minutes work. Basic steps are:

  1. Install from Source, using the instructions here
  2. Copy the file “Template.js” in the folder plugin/js/parsers.
  3. Rename the copied file, based on the site you want to parse.
  4. Add link to the new file to popup.html.
  5. Text replace “Template” in the file with the new Parser name.
  6. Uncomment the functions of the template you need, modifying the sample implementations as required. Refer to Customizing the Template Parser for a new Web Site for a worked example

Support latest Firefox for Android

At time of writing (2021-01-14), WebToEpub did not work with latest version of Firefox for Android. This is because Mozilla decided that extensions are too big a security risk. They changed the Standard version of Firefox for Android so it no longer support extentions. Except for a small number that Mozilla hand verified. To run extensions, you need to run the Nightly version of Firefox for Android.

Add ability to reduce speed that WbeToEpub fetches pages

A couple of sites do rate limiting. That is, when they detect a browser making a lot of calls quickly, they tell the broswer to slow down. Providied the site responds with HTTP 429 messagtes, WebToEpub will slow down as requested. However, you can also reduce WebToEpub’s request rate by throttling using opening the Browser’s Object inspector and throttling the internet speed. This may give better overall performance than relying on the 429 backoff.

Please add support for getting chapter list from NovelUpdates

The NovelUpdate site owners have told me not to do this. So, sorry, I can’t do this.