ebook-polish - ebook-polish
ebook-polish [options] input_file [output_file]
Polishing books is all about putting the shine of perfection onto
your carefully crafted e-books.
Polishing tries to minimize the changes to the internal code of
your e-book. Unlike conversion, it does not flatten CSS, rename files,
change font sizes, adjust margins, etc. Every action performs only the
minimum set of changes needed for the desired effect.
You should use this tool as the last step in your e-book creation
process.
Note that polishing only works on files in the AZW3 or EPUB
formats.
Whenever you pass arguments to ebook-polish that have
spaces in them, enclose the arguments in quotation marks. For example:
"/some path/with spaces"
- --add-soft-hyphens,
-H
- Add soft hyphens to all words in the book. This allows the book to be
rendered better when the text is justified, in readers that do not support
hyphenation.
- --compress-images,
-i
- Losslessly compress images in the book, to reduce the filesize, without
affecting image quality.
- --cover,
-c
- Path to a cover image. Changes the cover specified in the e-book. If no
cover is present, or the cover is not properly identified, inserts a new
cover.
- --embed-fonts,
-e
- Embed all fonts that are referenced in the document and are not already
embedded. This will scan your computer for the fonts, and if they are
found, they will be embedded into the document. Please ensure that you
have the proper license for embedding the fonts used in this
document.
- --jacket,
-j
- Insert a "book jacket" page at the start of the
book that contains all the book metadata such as title, tags, authors,
series, comments, etc. Any previous book jacket will be replaced.
- --opf, -o
- Path to an OPF file. The metadata in the book is updated from the OPF
file.
- --remove-unused-css,
-u
- Remove all unused CSS rules from stylesheets and <style> tags. Some
books created from production templates can have a large number of extra
CSS rules that don't match any actual content. These extra rules
can slow down readers that need to parse them all.
- --smarten-punctuation,
-p
- Convert plain text dashes, ellipsis, quotes, multiple hyphens, etc. into
their typographically correct equivalents. Note that the algorithm can
sometimes generate incorrect results, especially when single quotes at the
start of contractions are involved.
- --subset-fonts,
-f
- Subsetting fonts means reducing an embedded font to contain only the
characters used from that font in the book. This greatly reduces the size
of the font files (halving the font file sizes is common). For example, if
the book uses a specific font for headers, then subsetting will reduce
that font to contain only the characters present in the actual headers in
the book. Or if the book embeds the bold and italic versions of a font,
but bold and italic text is relatively rare, or absent altogether, then
the bold and italic fonts can either be reduced to only a few characters
or completely removed. The only downside to subsetting fonts is that if,
at a later date you decide to add more text to your books, the newly added
text might not be covered by the subset font.
- --upgrade-book,
-U
- Upgrade the internal structures of the book, if possible. For instance,
upgrades EPUB 2 books to EPUB 3 books.
- --verbose
- Produce more verbose output, useful for debugging.
- --version
- show program's version number and exit