I don't know if this is an appropriate question to ask here? It doesn't seem to be against any rules I could find...
I'd love to contribute to the site by uploading some webnovels that I've started reading that I can't find here.
What I want to ask is, how are you guys compiling webnovels together? Is there a piece of software your using? Or is it all done manually? Do you go through an editing/formatting process or something similar?
Given how frequently some of you post in the LN/WN sharing section, I cant imagine you are doing all that work manually. So I am genuinely curious.
I completly understand if you want to keep your knowledge as a "trade secret" of sorts, and honestly, part of my interest is getti g novels for my own entertainment (I listen at work, so it would be awesome if i could get what i want based on my own interest.) And anything I get for myself, I would love to share to this wonderful comunity.
Anyways. Thank you for all the content you all put in the work to provide to us lowly leeches. Hopefully I can become more than just a leech soon haha.
Thanks for the insight. Sounds like my method isn't to far off. I'm fiddling with a quick way to format the Epub(s) I'm generating.
Right now, it's good enough for my own enjoyment, but its just one block of text with no chapter breaks. Hopefully theres a quick and easy way to automate adding them and generating the table of contents.
My method, for those who see this and are interested is as follows:
- Open the webpage to the first chapter of the web novel.
- Save the web page as a TXT file. I use a macro to do this repeatedly, I dont have patience to sit there and manually do it.
- Repeat for X number of chapters, saving each file into a designated folder.
- Remove header and footer from each TXT file, leaving only the chapter title and contents.
- Use a c# program (Thank you chatGPT for the code) to compile the TXT files in the folder into a single TXT file.
- Use Calibre to convert the TXT into an EPUB and add cover image.
If anyone else wants to share their process I'm also interested in learning how to compile them
My Method as follows:
First of all i should mention utilities i use
Caliber (Its best in features for editing and removing unwanted links from pages/chapters etc. tho i used regex, find/replace and classes function to do the work, it used to take me two hours to make epub when i had the pc)
LN-Crawler (Basically it scraps the chapters from sites simultaneously it fails to download some chapters which later i have to find that chapter and manually add it into epub)
Create a macro for each novel website which then copies the chapters onto a microsoft word doc.
Prefer this over txt as it preserves formatting and I can correct TL errors and whatnot as I read.
Then for sharing, convert that doc to a epub.
For the ones I do myself before finding this beautiful place. Great for JP/CN/KR that I want to read and have in country accounts for. It's a hassle but when I'm willing to put in the effort to do this craziness...
This is only good for websites that have js protected scrapes, much easier ways for normal sites. There are prob other ways but this is how I do it.
ShareX scroll capture (adjust the website size to rid margins, point and click ;D )
Splitimage to break up the big screen shot(got to be careful here cause you might cut out lines)
Chatgpt for translations from images (can only do about 30-40 ch a day with plus which is fine for my personal needs)
Sigil for epubs (only good if your coder friendly)