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  • which format is more suitable for reading on a laptop and Ubuntu (for bookmarks, annotations, viewing, navigation, ...): chm or epub?

  • which format is more suitable for converting to pdf on Ubuntu: chm or epub?

Thanks!

Tim
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epub is more suitable for reading on a laptop and Ubuntu (for bookmarks, annotations, viewing, navigation, etc.) using Calibre E-Book Viewer from the default Ubuntu repositoriese. Calibre is meant to be a complete e-library solution. It includes library management and format conversion and there are options for customizing an ebook's look and feel in the Calibre Preferences.

epub doesn't convert to pdf very well, however epub converts to rtf properly using Calibre and rtf converts to pdf perfectly using LibreOffice Writer. To get a good-looking pdf document, you have to try different font sizes, indentations, line spacings, etc. for the rtf document until you find the combination that can be converted to a pdf document that looks good to you.

karel
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  • Thanks. does chm convert to pdf not well similarly to epub? – Tim Feb 25 '15 at 14:23
  • I don't know. epub is my favorite ebook format, and I use it whenever possible. Sometimes I convert ebooks with other formats to epub because epub documents are editable. – karel Feb 25 '15 at 14:26
  • "epub are editable". can I add some comments (text, line, ...) on epub files, and can I add its bookmarks (i.e. outlines)? – Tim Feb 25 '15 at 14:28
  • You can add/remove bookmarks to any ebook in your Calibre library by clicking the Bookmarks icon in the Calibre interface. You can show/hide the Table of Contents navigation pane in Calibre any time by clicking the icon that looks like three horizontal lines. An epub document is really a zip archive containing many separate files (often "chapters") in html format or an html-based format. epub is an open format, so if you change the .epub extension to .zip you can access the html files and freely edit them in an IDE, if you are familiar with HTML and CSS. – karel Feb 25 '15 at 14:47
  • thanks. what are some good IDEs to edit html files? Are they WYSIWYG? – Tim Feb 25 '15 at 14:53
  • I use Geany from the Ubuntu Software Center. Geany isn't WYSIWYG, but it's lightweight and it's what I'm used to. Geany is like Notepad++ for Windows if you've ever used that. There are also other GUI applications for editing ebooks that can be downloaded and installed, but I haven't tried any of them. – karel Feb 25 '15 at 15:03