Some days it just seems mother Earth has slipped on the axis. Or that you have.
I have worked since near 8 am this morning til, now, 3:32 this afternoon on one problem: making Win 7’s eccentricities (it won’t erase some files, or will, but it tells you it hasn’t) AND Mobipocket Creator’s idiosyncrasies: who knew we want UTC and not Western and European?—AND Namo [we’re sorry: another user has this program in use. Bye!]—into just giving me a flippin’ simple conversion of my not very complex [no special fonts] file of Rusalka.
I have loaded the program and unloaded it; updated it; repaired it; thrown it off the disk and re-loaded and installed it AND its reader-program, which it did not deign to move over to this computer from the old one…I have done that for a significant number of times, intermittent with trying to make this program behave. The key is—and Jane, bless her, finally helped me with the final set of glitches—it wants a huge cover file, poster-sized. It wants you to be UTC if you have any odd characters. And it wants to put the files where IT wants, not where you had them, and then wants to fuss about it. In the kerfluffle, I had a .png and a .jpg, and the .jpg was what was in the html ‘call’, and was in a folder not now being used, and the .png was where the .jpg should have been and the ‘call’ didn’t want it. Jane’s sharp eyes on the problem found that little detail (with html, it’s always something of the sort) and bingo! the last of the problems went away.
It’s been months since I ran MPC, and it’s reminiscent of the old word-processing programs from before menus: you’re on your own, kid: it’s wrong, but you have to guess why.
Any rate, the Reader part of it behaves flawlessly, which is the part you’ll see; it’s the creator part that drives yours truly nutz.
Tonight I sit watching telly and running the rest of the file conversions, and Jane will have hers in good shape, so we should have our two spooky downloads for Closed Circle right before Halloween!
Oh! the fix—for Win 7 not admitting it’s erased a file? Hit the ‘refresh’ icon, and they’ll disappear.
Same with Vista, sometimes.
I missed the joys of Vista! Thank goodness!
I’m looking forward to a pleasant weekend reading while number 1 daughter practices her cello… If I hear Brahms Waltz in A flat Major one more time, I’m running screaming for the hills (fortunately, not more than 3 miles away.) The new puppy (Pepper) is not a music critic so he manages to go to sleep while I rub his tummy or his ears during the cello practice.
I’m really excited about Jane’s Blood Red Moon series getting off the ground and it’s been ages since I last read Rusalka. How different will Rusalka be from the original?
Rusalka, not too much,but line by line, a lot, and some clarfication added, where what happens is needlessly fuzzy; but Chernevog—I was writing that one in the middle of life-and-death family illness crises, and there are sentences that don’t even make sense. I am rewriting it, in English, this time. I haven’t looked at Yvgenie, but the madness continued, so possibly that will be a project, too.
Sainted are the parents of music students. My parents tolerated the flute and piccolo, but drew the line at a 5.00 violin I got at a garage sale. Periodically when my brother’s children were young, I threatened him at Christmas with the dire words, “I bought X a drum.”
Hopefully you’re a baseball and not just a Mariners fan and are enjoying the Series. I was at the game last night and it was great.
FYI, I’m a native San Franciscan.
Phil Brown
We have one relative and several friends who are Giants fans. Lol—the Mariners have (thanks to our management) a tradition of shedding really good players all over, so whatever team is doing well probably has an ex-Mariner I’m fond of.
I still have Vista! the business one, was supposed to be the best …..
Win 7 has virtues, compared to XP. It’s a pretty good OS for a change!
But we now have, in our list of conversions we’ve taken Rusalka and Moon into—HTML, PDF, PRC/Mobi, EPUB and FB. Except—for some reason patches of Jane’s novel turned invisible and she declared she’d had it for the day: we decided to watch the finale of Project Runway at that point. The results were just as bizarre as disappearing text. So we gave up and called it a day.
I really like my Win 7 I have at work and on my desktop at home. I still have Vista on my laptop and had to revert to factory install twice on it because of fatal errors occurring during required updates. I’d revert back to a stage prior to the update, run the update again, and same bad results. Now I am running it back at the level it came out of the box and just not letting it update at all. Annoying popup alerts are better than blue screen. I’m going to have to get Win 7 on it too eventually.
I’ve had that “deleted but not gone” problem with Win 7 also and resolved with with the refresh. It doesn’t happen all the time. I think it has something to do with having that preview sidebar open and previewing the file while you are trying to delete it. It doesn’t want to let me rename a file while it is being previewed on the sidebar. I’ve just gotten into the habit of making sure that sidebar isn’t turned on and I’ve had less trouble.
I don’t have a preview sidebar. In this case the file had been created by Mobipocket Creator in a different subfolder of another folder, copying but not moving a file resident in a subfolder of a subfolder of a second project folder. When I attempted to delete five of these files, it showed them still present, and hopping between folders did not refresh the screen. It retained that information and kept swearing it didn’t know where they were. It was still sticking to that story hours later when I came back and hit ‘refresh,’ at which point they vanished.
Posted this post to Facebook and someone added this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C_HjWr3Nk
He uses a certain four-letter word a lot but the skit is a gas 🙂
That was very funny.
Ctrl P print, Ctrl P print, Ctrl P print… Yeah, I can see that would be the way the world ends.
I’m looking forward to Rusalka and will gladly check out Jane’s new series.
That invisible, disappearing text? Well, it *is* close to Halloween….
I’ve run into something like that before converting Word files to HTML, but danged if I can recall what the culprit turned out to be. It was so obscure that I congratulated myself when I finally found it…and plainly have now forgotten, blast it. :-/ I can still offer some possibly useful suggestions, though.
However, double-check that there hasn’t been some fumbled tag closing, or else check the CSS styles for display: none; or visibility: hidden; and recall that Word tends to omit spaces after the colon. Another obscure possibility is that it has set the height to some ridiculously small value. Hmm… setting the text to white on white, aside from being a quite stsho aesthetic, might occur, or black on black. (Search for the background or background-color strings, or color, the latter being the text color. Another possibility would be a stray comment opening or closing tag. Note almost all those are CSS styles. CSS is great stuff, but if the coders doing the format transmogrifier program slip up… it’s much the same as if they slip up on the HTML transformations.
Trying to parse through all that and clean up things, in whatever stages, can be maddening. It’s easy to slip up yourself, even when paying careful attention, and some search-and-replace operations can have unintended, unanticipated, very much unplanned side effects.
Oh — Another thing to check is the editing status (editor comment, insertion, deletion, etc.) or ancillary data that may be placed in the notes used in the tags themselves. Word, at least, has a bad habit of including things in the notations it keeps, which may get into the exported HTML in a way that confuses or hides it from the rest of us, but may be retained in the exported HTML. (The editing Track Changes info, various “Office smart tags” info, and the like are what I’m talking about there. I’m presuming you have it remove private/personal info in the Security tab anyway, so as to omit who made editing changes and author info.)
I’m not familiar with NAMO; I’ll need to look for it.
It sounds like the conversion process is extremely messy and tedious and the tools are immature. My sympathies to you both!
Heh, and by the way —
If you’ve had a bear of a day dealing with the bull’s, er, gifts, then either honey or perhaps salmon are in order. Or berries, if you’d rather avoid fish or other meat.
My comedic timing’s quite off today, isn’t it? 😉
Lol!
One of the things that has helped a lot with conversions is a program called Sigil. It breaks into the ePub code and tells you what the CSS is doing, and where, and why. Somehow the original file was corrupted in a transfer between two of our machines, isn’t that lovely? It kept inserting meaningless though harmless code between every 2 lines, —harmless in ePub, but not when you get to the files derived from ePub.
Spe-ci-al, in the nastiest sort of way.