So I made the first big change in my repository for eBook utilities in a long time, largely because I’m toying with completely changing my workflow. I used Pandoc with a recent conversion, and it was very very nice.
But right now I’m doing the eBook layout for Steampunk World and I ran into a problem I’d almost forgotten about – extended characters.
Not just your “normal” accented characters, but ones that literally have unicode names of “inodot”. So instead of scrolling up and down across four different unicode reference webpages, I updated my referring entities script to be able to search and the reference text file to add extended-A and extended-B.
Basic instructions here:
https://ideatrash.net/2012/02/so-you-want-to-make-ebook-quick-access.html
Because all the tools involved (awk, sed, zenity) are cross-platform, you should be able to make it work pretty easily no matter what system you’re on. And the first time you run into a conversion job that has a lot of special characters, you’ll thank me.