How to make eBooks out of text files and other questions/answers

I like to read eBooks while travelling. One of the best sources of free eBooks is Project Gutenberg. I greatly respect what Project Gutenberg does, but at the same time I think its formatting standards are completely outdated (which is no surprise knowing it started in 1971) and a stupid design decision. In particular: truncating the lines to a fixed length and limiting to use ASCII as the encoding (as this rules out all non-english texts or cripples them severely). Using UTF-8 instead would have practically no drawback, because the ASCII characters take up as much space while leaving full compatibility and extendability for non-english texts.
They also refuse markup, which is exqually limiting, because it is very easy to remove markup to get back to plain text (just drop everything between < and >), wheter it's XML or HTML, but very difficult to add it.
So I have written a python script that tries to improve the formatting and adds some bookmarks.

Tools for *.pdb and *.prc files

Useful stuff. If you need to know the pdb or prc file format for development purposes, look at the code that comes with the tools below.

  1. To read pdb/prc files on Windows use DocReader, source available too
  2. To create pdb/prc files on Windows use MakeDocW
  3. To create pdb/prc files on Unix/Linux use txt2pdbdoc, source available too
  4. To create pdb/prc files from HTML online use the Heise online url2doc tool, based on txt2pdbdoc
  5. A good reader for Symbian devices is ReadM by Alexander Zavorine (unfortunately his homepages are all old, but you can download the software from various PDA sites)

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