Thread: FBReader and its .fb2 format
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RogerS is offline RogerS
2006-01-17 , 17:23
Posts: 772 | Thanked: 183 times | Joined on Jul 2005 @ Montclair, NJ (NYC suburbs)
#6
I'm writing this much later than the original inquiry, but I have now a little better understanding of FBReader and of the FB2 format.

For my initial period of reading, I stuck with books in the Plucker format, although occasionally I read material in html and plain text. All three of these can be put into a zip archive to make them smaller, and FBReader will open them fine.

I started to convert some of the html files to Plucker in order to add some links and such -- FBReader won't link to #names in html unless they're on an <a> element, I've since learned, which was the initial problem -- and some of that went well and some of it was awkward or unsuccessful. From inexperience mostly, I think.

But that led me to look for information about the FB2 format. You can readily enough convert html files to FB2-marked up files and from them use free utilities to make books in the FB2 format. From a user's standpoint, FBR markup is XML not HTML and it includes a great deal of metadata, some of which will go directly into FBReader's library. HTML's paragraph (<p>) tags and <body> and anchor <a> tags show up, but many others are added, and a certain structure is specified for where titles may go, which enables Tables of Contents to be built by the conversion program.

And FB2 format brings up each footnote in a separate window, instead of the crude method of making them all endnotes and just linking to them and then pressing the back arrow to return to the text.

So as a publisher/bookmaker, I find that the FB2 format has a lot to recommend it.

As a reader, I'm very happy with reading Plucker, html and text files in FBReader. But I have found many English language texts, especially at FictionBook.lib, in the FB2 format.
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