[FR] epub support?

[sisi-sh]

Describe your request

Hi devs,

Love the plugin, use it all the time and I greatly prefer it to Annotator. It's incredible. My only question is if there has been any thought of implementing or reverse engineering in support for epub files? It's the only thing I still have Annotator installed for.

Thanks!
-sisi

[RyotaUshio]

Thanks!

I'd love to see Epub support, too.

However, the underlying mechanisms behind the rendering of PDFs and epubs are significantly different.
For PDFs, I can reuse Obsidian's built-in PDF viewer, but I have to re-invent the viewer itself for epubs.

Given this plugin is developed by an unpaid grad student with limited resources, it will not happen in the short term.
I will happily cooperate with you if anyone is interested in collaborating on this issue.

[RyotaUshio]

For epubs, there seems to be a standard for subpath formats:

https://idpf.org/epub/linking/cfi/epub-cfi.html

[antomonte]

Maybe you could contact with authors of these plugins?

• https://github.com/AwesomeDog/obsidian-awesome-reader
• https://github.com/caronchen/obsidian-epub-plugin

Certainly, handling ebooks is the only missing feature for PDF++ to become the Swiss knife for annotation within Obsidian.

[N3C2L]

In the meantime you could convert your e-books from .EPUB to .PDF format with calibre:

https://github.com/kovidgoyal/calibre/releases

1. In the calibre toolbar - click "choose library" (icon with books on shelf symbol)
2. Choose a path for your library
3. Right click a new imported book in the calibre interface - and click 'convert books' - 'convert individually' or 'bulk convert' (if many books needs batch conversion).

In the conversion dialogue leave everything in its default settings except:

1. Left on top 'input format' to 'EPUB'.
2. Right on top 'output format' to 'PDF'.
3. Optional: Left side: 'look & feel' - 'styling' - and click to enable the checkbox on "colors" (Image colors won't be affected, that's good!) - This is only important if you have other background colors than black or white inside PDF++ (adapt to theme option enabled inside PDF++)
4. Optional: Left side: 'PDF output' - checkbox enable 'Use page margins from the document being converted' with values: Left: 5.0pt, Right: 5.0pt, Top: 1.0pt, Bottom: 1.0pt. (This will ensure that your document is smaller sized with fewer pages and less to scroll).
5. Optional: If you have made any changes and would like to save this changes as default settings for every other new conversion: go to 'Preferences' - 'Conversion' - 3 options here for the presets: 'common options', 'input options', 'output options'.
6. After conversion - right click the book again and choose 'open book folder'.
7. Then you can easily import that .PDF file into obsidian to use it with PDF++.

[learner0004]

Thank you so much for this wonderful plugin, the only most important feature it is lacking is Epub support, I hope we will have good news soon.

[starise]

In the meantime you could convert your e-books from .EPUB to .PDF format with calibre:

Honestly, I think epub is a better format than pdf. Since epub is based on html it's also easier to edit and convert to Markdown. Instead of converting epub to pdf, I would do the opposite.

[O-Hatem]

Honestly, I think epub is a better format than pdf. Since epub is based on html it's also easier to edit and convert to Markdown. Instead of converting epub to pdf, I would do the opposite.

Totally agree, @starise . But I was never able to successfully convert PDFs to EBUBs. I've tried using calibre but a lot of things don't convert properly, if at all. Please share any tools you've had better luck with.