On Sat, Mar 09, 2024 at 09:34:12AM -0500, Greg Reagle wrote: > I have an epub ebook. It is a novel, but when I get this process working, I > want to repeat it for any epub ebook. > > I want to read it, with formatting (such as underline or italics), with less. > I am happy to use any software that exists in the process, but I MUST use > less in the end to read it. The terminal emulators that I use are usually > st, xterm, and termux. All of them are capable of colored text and > underlining and so forth, and I want to take advantage of this. > > Pandoc does a very good job converting epub to html, and it looks good with > w3m, however when I use w3m in a pipe, the output is truly *plain* text, > meaning there are no escape codes for formatting. Same story with elinks. > Is it possible to get either of these programs, or some other program, to > dump html to text *with* escape codes? > > Since I could not get HTML to work, I went with man format. Amazing. Pandoc > automatically chooses man format for output based on the '.1' extension in > the followingv > pandoc --standalone -o City_of_Truth-Morrow.1 City_of_Truth-Morrow.epub > Remember to use standalone option or it won't work. Then > man --local-file --pager 'less -ir' City_of_Truth-Morrow.1 > It looks great! (for text only on a terminal) It has bold and underlined > text. From there I can use less 's' command to save the formatted text to a > file. > > There might be a better or more direct way of achieving this goal, but this I > what I figured out for now. And the rationale is this: I already know and > love less. There is no good reason for me to learn the user interface of a > different program like an epub reader or an html reader to read a book that > does not have graphics, diagrams, pictures, and/or custom formatting. >
Hi, Maybe mupdf/mutools or the eGhostscript tools o qpdf? -- Kind regards, Hiltjo
