HTML Input

HTML Input to EPUB Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output epub

--dont-split-on-page-breaks

Turn off splitting at page breaks. Normally, input files are automatically split at every page break into two files. This gives an output ebook that can be parsed faster and with less resources. However, splitting is slow and if your source file contains a very large number of page breaks, you should turn off splitting on page breaks.

--epub-flatten

This option is needed only if you intend to use the EPUB with FBReaderJ. It will flatten the file system inside the EPUB, putting all files into the top level.

--extract-to

Extract the contents of the generated EPUB file to the specified directory. The contents of the directory are first deleted, so be careful.

--flow-size

Split all HTML files larger than this size (in KB). This is necessary as most EPUB readers cannot handle large file sizes. The default of 260KB is the size required for Adobe Digital Editions.

--no-default-epub-cover

Normally, if the input file has no cover and you don’t specify one, a default cover is generated with the title, authors, etc. This option disables the generation of this cover.

--no-svg-cover

Do not use SVG for the book cover. Use this option if your EPUB is going to be used on a device that does not support SVG, like the iPhone or the JetBook Lite. Without this option, such devices will display the cover as a blank page.

--preserve-cover-aspect-ratio

When using an SVG cover, this option will cause the cover to scale to cover the available screen area, but still preserve its aspect ratio (ratio of width to height). That means there may be white borders at the sides or top and bottom of the image, but the image will never be distorted. Without this option the image may be slightly distorted, but there will be no borders.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to FB2 Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output fb2

--fb2-genre

Genre for the book. Choices: [‘sf_history’, ‘sf_action’, ‘sf_epic’, ‘sf_heroic’, ‘sf_detective’, ‘sf_cyberpunk’, ‘sf_space’, ‘sf_social’, ‘sf_horror’, ‘sf_humor’, ‘sf_fantasy’, ‘sf’, ‘det_classic’, ‘det_police’, ‘det_action’, ‘det_irony’, ‘det_history’, ‘det_espionage’, ‘det_crime’, ‘det_political’, ‘det_maniac’, ‘det_hard’, ‘thriller’, ‘detective’, ‘prose_classic’, ‘prose_history’, ‘prose_contemporary’, ‘prose_counter’, ‘prose_rus_classic’, ‘prose_su_classics’, ‘love_contemporary’, ‘love_history’, ‘love_detective’, ‘love_short’, ‘love_erotica’, ‘adv_western’, ‘adv_history’, ‘adv_indian’, ‘adv_maritime’, ‘adv_geo’, ‘adv_animal’, ‘adventure’, ‘child_tale’, ‘child_verse’, ‘child_prose’, ‘child_sf’, ‘child_det’, ‘child_adv’, ‘child_education’, ‘children’, ‘poetry’, ‘dramaturgy’, ‘antique_ant’, ‘antique_european’, ‘antique_russian’, ‘antique_east’, ‘antique_myths’, ‘antique’, ‘sci_history’, ‘sci_psychology’, ‘sci_culture’, ‘sci_religion’, ‘sci_philosophy’, ‘sci_politics’, ‘sci_business’, ‘sci_juris’, ‘sci_linguistic’, ‘sci_medicine’, ‘sci_phys’, ‘sci_math’, ‘sci_chem’, ‘sci_biology’, ‘sci_tech’, ‘science’, ‘comp_www’, ‘comp_programming’, ‘comp_hard’, ‘comp_soft’, ‘comp_db’, ‘comp_osnet’, ‘computers’, ‘ref_encyc’, ‘ref_dict’, ‘ref_ref’, ‘ref_guide’, ‘reference’, ‘nonf_biography’, ‘nonf_publicism’, ‘nonf_criticism’, ‘design’, ‘nonfiction’, ‘religion_rel’, ‘religion_esoterics’, ‘religion_self’, ‘religion’, ‘humor_anecdote’, ‘humor_prose’, ‘humor_verse’, ‘humor’, ‘home_cooking’, ‘home_pets’, ‘home_crafts’, ‘home_entertain’, ‘home_health’, ‘home_garden’, ‘home_diy’, ‘home_sport’, ‘home_sex’, ‘home’] See: http://www.fictionbook.org/index.php/Eng:FictionBook_2.1_genres for a complete list with descriptions.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--sectionize

Specify the sectionization of elements. A value of “nothing” turns the book into a single section. A value of “files” turns each file into a separate section; use this if your device is having trouble. A value of “Table of Contents” turns the entries in the Table of Contents into titles and creates sections; if it fails, adjust the “Structure Detection” and/or “Table of Contents” settings (turn on “Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents”).

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to LIT Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output lit

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to LRF Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output lrf

--enable-autorotation

Enable autorotation of images that are wider than the screen width.

--header

Add a header to all the pages with title and author.

--header-format

Set the format of the header. %a is replaced by the author and %t by the title. Default is %t by %a

--header-separation

Add extra spacing below the header. Default is 0 pt.

--minimum-indent

Minimum paragraph indent (the indent of the first line of a paragraph) in pts. Default: 0

--mono-family

The monospace family of fonts to embed

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--render-tables-as-images

Render tables in the HTML as images (useful if the document has large or complex tables)

--sans-family

The sans-serif family of fonts to embed

--serif-family

The serif family of fonts to embed

--text-size-multiplier-for-rendered-tables

Multiply the size of text in rendered tables by this factor. Default is 1.0

--wordspace

Set the space between words in pts. Default is 2.5

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to MOBI Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output mobi

--dont-compress

Disable compression of the file contents.

--extract-to

Extract the contents of the MOBI file to the specified directory. If the directory already exists, it will be deleted.

--mobi-ignore-margins

Ignore margins in the input document. If False, then the MOBI output plugin will try to convert margins specified in the input document, otherwise it will ignore them.

--mobi-keep-original-images

By default calibre converts all images to JPEG format in the output MOBI file. This is for maximum compatibility as some older MOBI viewers have problems with other image formats. This option tells calibre not to do this. Useful if your document contains lots of GIF/PNG images that become very large when converted to JPEG.

--mobi-toc-at-start

When adding the Table of Contents to the book, add it at the start of the book instead of the end. Not recommended.

--no-inline-toc

Don’t add Table of Contents to the book. Useful if the book has its own table of contents.

--personal-doc

Tag marking book to be filed with Personal Docs

--prefer-author-sort

When present, use author sort field as author.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--share-not-sync

Enable sharing of book content via Facebook etc. on the Kindle. WARNING: Using this feature means that the book will not auto sync its last read position on multiple devices. Complain to Amazon.

--toc-title

Title for any generated in-line table of contents.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to AZW3 Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output azw3

--dont-compress

Disable compression of the file contents.

--extract-to

Extract the contents of the MOBI file to the specified directory. If the directory already exists, it will be deleted.

--mobi-toc-at-start

When adding the Table of Contents to the book, add it at the start of the book instead of the end. Not recommended.

--no-inline-toc

Don’t add Table of Contents to the book. Useful if the book has its own table of contents.

--prefer-author-sort

When present, use author sort field as author.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--share-not-sync

Enable sharing of book content via Facebook etc. on the Kindle. WARNING: Using this feature means that the book will not auto sync its last read position on multiple devices. Complain to Amazon.

--toc-title

Title for any generated in-line table of contents.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to OEB Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output oeb

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to PDB Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output pdb

--format, -f

Format to use inside the pdb container. Choices are: [‘doc’, ‘ztxt’, ‘ereader’]

--inline-toc

Add Table of Contents to beginning of the book.

--pdb-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is cp1252. Note: This option is not honored by all formats.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to PDF Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output pdf

--custom-size

Custom size of the document. Use the form widthxheight EG. 123x321 to specify the width and height. This overrides any specified paper-size.

--orientation

The orientation of the page. Default is portrait. Choices are [‘portrait’, ‘landscape’]

--paper-size

The size of the paper. This size will be overridden when a non default output profile is used. Default is letter. Choices are [‘b2’, ‘a9’, ‘executive’, ‘tabloid’, ‘b4’, ‘b5’, ‘b6’, ‘b7’, ‘b0’, ‘b1’, ‘letter’, ‘b3’, ‘a7’, ‘a8’, ‘b8’, ‘b9’, ‘a3’, ‘a1’, ‘folio’, ‘c5e’, ‘dle’, ‘a0’, ‘ledger’, ‘legal’, ‘a6’, ‘a2’, ‘b10’, ‘a5’, ‘comm10e’, ‘a4’]

--preserve-cover-aspect-ratio

Preserve the aspect ratio of the cover, instead of stretching it to fill the full first page of the generated pdf.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--unit, -u

The unit of measure. Default is inch. Choices are [‘millimeter’, ‘point’, ‘inch’, ‘pica’, ‘didot’, ‘cicero’, ‘devicepixel’] Note: This does not override the unit for margins!

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to PML Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output pmlz

--full-image-depth

Do not reduce the size or bit depth of images. Images have their size and depth reduced by default to accommodate applications that can not convert images on their own such as Dropbook.

--inline-toc

Add Table of Contents to beginning of the book.

--pml-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is cp1252.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to RB Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output rb

--inline-toc

Add Table of Contents to beginning of the book.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to RTF Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output rtf

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to TCR Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output tcr

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--tcr-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is utf-8.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to TXT Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output txt

--force-max-line-length

Force splitting on the max-line-length value when no space is present. Also allows max-line-length to be below the minimum

--inline-toc

Add Table of Contents to beginning of the book.

--keep-color

Do not remove font color from output. This is only useful when txt-output-formatting is set to textile. Textile is the only formatting that supports setting font color. If this option is not specified font color will not be set and default to the color displayed by the reader (generally this is black).

--keep-image-references

Do not remove image references within the document. This is only useful when paired with a txt-output-formatting option that is not none because links are always removed with plain text output.

--keep-links

Do not remove links within the document. This is only useful when paired with a txt-output-formatting option that is not none because links are always removed with plain text output.

--max-line-length

The maximum number of characters per line. This splits on the first space before the specified value. If no space is found the line will be broken at the space after and will exceed the specified value. Also, there is a minimum of 25 characters. Use 0 to disable line splitting.

--newline, -n

Type of newline to use. Options are [‘old_mac’, ‘system’, ‘unix’, ‘windows’]. Default is ‘system’. Use ‘old_mac’ for compatibility with Mac OS 9 and earlier. For Mac OS X use ‘unix’. ‘system’ will default to the newline type used by this OS.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--txt-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is utf-8.

--txt-output-formatting

Formatting used within the document. * plain: Produce plain text. * markdown: Produce Markdown formatted text. * textile: Produce Textile formatted text.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to TXTZ Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output txtz

--force-max-line-length

Force splitting on the max-line-length value when no space is present. Also allows max-line-length to be below the minimum

--inline-toc

Add Table of Contents to beginning of the book.

--keep-color

Do not remove font color from output. This is only useful when txt-output-formatting is set to textile. Textile is the only formatting that supports setting font color. If this option is not specified font color will not be set and default to the color displayed by the reader (generally this is black).

--keep-image-references

Do not remove image references within the document. This is only useful when paired with a txt-output-formatting option that is not none because links are always removed with plain text output.

--keep-links

Do not remove links within the document. This is only useful when paired with a txt-output-formatting option that is not none because links are always removed with plain text output.

--max-line-length

The maximum number of characters per line. This splits on the first space before the specified value. If no space is found the line will be broken at the space after and will exceed the specified value. Also, there is a minimum of 25 characters. Use 0 to disable line splitting.

--newline, -n

Type of newline to use. Options are [‘old_mac’, ‘system’, ‘unix’, ‘windows’]. Default is ‘system’. Use ‘old_mac’ for compatibility with Mac OS 9 and earlier. For Mac OS X use ‘unix’. ‘system’ will default to the newline type used by this OS.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--txt-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is utf-8.

--txt-output-formatting

Formatting used within the document. * plain: Produce plain text. * markdown: Produce Markdown formatted text. * textile: Produce Textile formatted text.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to HTML Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output zip

--extract-to

Extract the contents of the generated ZIP file to the specified directory. WARNING: The contents of the directory will be deleted.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--template-css

CSS file used for the output instead of the default file

--template-html

Template used for the generation of the html contents of the book instead of the default file

--template-html-index

Template used for generation of the html index file instead of the default file

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to HTMLZ Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output htmlz

--htmlz-class-style

How to handle the CSS when using css-type = ‘class’. Default is external. external: Use an external CSS file that is linked in the document. inline: Place the CSS in the head section of the document.

--htmlz-css-type

Specify the handling of CSS. Default is class. class: Use CSS classes and have elements reference them. inline: Write the CSS as an inline style attribute. tag: Turn as many CSS styles as possible into HTML tags.

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.

HTML Input to SNB Output

--help, -h

show this help message and exit

--input-profile

Specify the input profile. The input profile gives the conversion system information on how to interpret various information in the input document. For example resolution dependent lengths (i.e. lengths in pixels). Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, irexdr1000, irexdr800, kindle, msreader, mobipocket, nook, sony, sony300, sony900

--list-recipes

List builtin recipe names. You can create an ebook from a builtin recipe like this: ebook-convert “Recipe Name.recipe” output.epub

--output-profile

Specify the output profile. The output profile tells the conversion system how to optimize the created document for the specified device. In some cases, an output profile is required to produce documents that will work on a device. For example EPUB on the SONY reader. Choices are:cybookg3, cybook_opus, default, generic_eink, generic_eink_large, hanlinv3, hanlinv5, illiad, ipad, ipad3, irexdr1000, irexdr800, jetbook5, kindle, kindle_dx, kindle_fire, kobo, msreader, mobipocket, nook, nook_color, pocketbook_900, galaxy, bambook, sony, sony300, sony900, sony-landscape, tablet

--version

show program’s version number and exit

INPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the input shtml file

--breadth-first

Traverse links in HTML files breadth first. Normally, they are traversed depth first.

--dont-package

Normally this input plugin re-arranges all the input files into a standard folder hierarchy. Only use this option if you know what you are doing as it can result in various nasty side effects in the rest of the conversion pipeline.

--input-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the input document. If set this option will override any encoding declared by the document itself. Particularly useful for documents that do not declare an encoding or that have erroneous encoding declarations.

--max-levels

Maximum levels of recursion when following links in HTML files. Must be non-negative. 0 implies that no links in the root HTML file are followed. Default is 5.

OUTPUT OPTIONS

Options to control the processing of the output snb

--pretty-print

If specified, the output plugin will try to create output that is as human readable as possible. May not have any effect for some output plugins.

--snb-dont-indent-first-line

Specify whether or not to insert two space characters to indent the first line of each paragraph.

--snb-full-screen

Resize all the images for full screen view.

--snb-hide-chapter-name

Specify whether or not to hide the chapter title for each chapter. Useful for image-only output (eg. comics).

--snb-insert-empty-line

Specify whether or not to insert an empty line between two paragraphs.

--snb-max-line-length

The maximum number of characters per line. This splits on the first space before the specified value. If no space is found the line will be broken at the space after and will exceed the specified value. Also, there is a minimum of 25 characters. Use 0 to disable line splitting.

--snb-output-encoding

Specify the character encoding of the output document. The default is utf-8.

LOOK AND FEEL

Options to control the look and feel of the output

--asciiize

Transliterate unicode characters to an ASCII representation. Use with care because this will replace unicode characters with ASCII. For instance it will replace “Михаил Горбачёв” with “Mikhail Gorbachiov”. Also, note that in cases where there are multiple representations of a character (characters shared by Chinese and Japanese for instance) the representation based on the current calibre interface language will be used.

--base-font-size

The base font size in pts. All font sizes in the produced book will be rescaled based on this size. By choosing a larger size you can make the fonts in the output bigger and vice versa. By default, the base font size is chosen based on the output profile you chose.

--change-justification

Change text justification. A value of “left” converts all justified text in the source to left aligned (i.e. unjustified) text. A value of “justify” converts all unjustified text to justified. A value of “original” (the default) does not change justification in the source file. Note that only some output formats support justification.

--disable-font-rescaling

Disable all rescaling of font sizes.

--extra-css

Either the path to a CSS stylesheet or raw CSS. This CSS will be appended to the style rules from the source file, so it can be used to override those rules.

--filter-css

A comma separated list of CSS properties that will be removed from all CSS style rules. This is useful if the presence of some style information prevents it from being overridden on your device. For example: font-family,color,margin-left,margin-right

--font-size-mapping

Mapping from CSS font names to font sizes in pts. An example setting is 12,12,14,16,18,20,22,24. These are the mappings for the sizes xx-small to xx-large, with the final size being for huge fonts. The font rescaling algorithm uses these sizes to intelligently rescale fonts. The default is to use a mapping based on the output profile you chose.

--insert-blank-line

Insert a blank line between paragraphs. Will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--insert-blank-line-size

Set the height of the inserted blank lines (in em). The height of the lines between paragraphs will be twice the value set here.

--keep-ligatures

Preserve ligatures present in the input document. A ligature is a special rendering of a pair of characters like ff, fi, fl et cetera. Most readers do not have support for ligatures in their default fonts, so they are unlikely to render correctly. By default, calibre will turn a ligature into the corresponding pair of normal characters. This option will preserve them instead.

--line-height

The line height in pts. Controls spacing between consecutive lines of text. Only applies to elements that do not define their own line height. In most cases, the minimum line height option is more useful. By default no line height manipulation is performed.

--linearize-tables

Some badly designed documents use tables to control the layout of text on the page. When converted these documents often have text that runs off the page and other artifacts. This option will extract the content from the tables and present it in a linear fashion.

--margin-bottom

Set the bottom margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-left

Set the left margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-right

Set the right margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--margin-top

Set the top margin in pts. Default is 5.0. Setting this to less than zero will cause no margin to be set. Note: 72 pts equals 1 inch

--minimum-line-height

The minimum line height, as a percentage of the element’s calculated font size. calibre will ensure that every element has a line height of at least this setting, irrespective of what the input document specifies. Set to zero to disable. Default is 120%. Use this setting in preference to the direct line height specification, unless you know what you are doing. For example, you can achieve “double spaced” text by setting this to 240.

--remove-paragraph-spacing

Remove spacing between paragraphs. Also sets an indent on paragraphs of 1.5em. Spacing removal will not work if the source file does not use paragraphs (<p> or <div> tags).

--remove-paragraph-spacing-indent-size

When calibre removes blank lines between paragraphs, it automatically sets a paragraph indent, to ensure that paragraphs can be easily distinguished. This option controls the width of that indent (in em). If you set this value negative, then the indent specified in the input document is used, that is, calibre does not change the indentation.

--smarten-punctuation

Convert plain quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their typographically correct equivalents. For details, see http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants

--unsmarten-punctuation

Convert fancy quotes, dashes and ellipsis to their plain equivalents.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING

Modify the document text and structure using common patterns. Disabled by default. Use –enable-heuristics to enable. Individual actions can be disabled with the –disable-* options.

--disable-dehyphenate

Analyze hyphenated words throughout the document. The document itself is used as a dictionary to determine whether hyphens should be retained or removed.

--disable-delete-blank-paragraphs

Remove empty paragraphs from the document when they exist between every other paragraph

--disable-fix-indents

Turn indentation created from multiple non-breaking space entities into CSS indents.

--disable-format-scene-breaks

Left aligned scene break markers are center aligned. Replace soft scene breaks that use multiple blank lines with horizontal rules.

--disable-italicize-common-cases

Look for common words and patterns that denote italics and italicize them.

--disable-markup-chapter-headings

Detect unformatted chapter headings and sub headings. Change them to h2 and h3 tags. This setting will not create a TOC, but can be used in conjunction with structure detection to create one.

--disable-renumber-headings

Looks for occurrences of sequential <h1> or <h2> tags. The tags are renumbered to prevent splitting in the middle of chapter headings.

--disable-unwrap-lines

Unwrap lines using punctuation and other formatting clues.

--enable-heuristics

Enable heuristic processing. This option must be set for any heuristic processing to take place.

--html-unwrap-factor

Scale used to determine the length at which a line should be unwrapped. Valid values are a decimal between 0 and 1. The default is 0.4, just below the median line length. If only a few lines in the document require unwrapping this value should be reduced

--replace-scene-breaks

Replace scene breaks with the specified text. By default, the text from the input document is used.

SEARCH AND REPLACE

Modify the document text and structure using user defined patterns.

--search-replace

Path to a file containing search and replace regular expressions. The file must contain alternating lines of regular expression followed by replacement pattern (which can be an empty line). The regular expression must be in the python regex syntax and the file must be UTF-8 encoded.

--sr1-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr1-search.

--sr1-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr1-replace.

--sr2-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr2-search.

--sr2-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr2-replace.

--sr3-replace

Replacement to replace the text found with sr3-search.

--sr3-search

Search pattern (regular expression) to be replaced with sr3-replace.

STRUCTURE DETECTION

Control auto-detection of document structure.

--chapter

An XPath expression to detect chapter titles. The default is to consider <h1> or <h2> tags that contain the words “chapter”,”book”,”section”, “prologue”, “epilogue”, or “part” as chapter titles as well as any tags that have class=”chapter”. The expression used must evaluate to a list of elements. To disable chapter detection, use the expression “/”. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for further help on using this feature.

--chapter-mark

Specify how to mark detected chapters. A value of “pagebreak” will insert page breaks before chapters. A value of “rule” will insert a line before chapters. A value of “none” will disable chapter marking and a value of “both” will use both page breaks and lines to mark chapters.

--disable-remove-fake-margins

Some documents specify page margins by specifying a left and right margin on each individual paragraph. calibre will try to detect and remove these margins. Sometimes, this can cause the removal of margins that should not have been removed. In this case you can disable the removal.

--insert-metadata

Insert the book metadata at the start of the book. This is useful if your ebook reader does not support displaying/searching metadata directly.

--page-breaks-before

An XPath expression. Page breaks are inserted before the specified elements.

--prefer-metadata-cover

Use the cover detected from the source file in preference to the specified cover.

--remove-first-image

Remove the first image from the input ebook. Useful if the input document has a cover image that is not identified as a cover. In this case, if you set a cover in calibre, the output document will end up with two cover images if you do not specify this option.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Control the automatic generation of a Table of Contents. By default, if the source file has a Table of Contents, it will be used in preference to the automatically generated one.

--duplicate-links-in-toc

When creating a TOC from links in the input document, allow duplicate entries, i.e. allow more than one entry with the same text, provided that they point to a different location.

--level1-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level one. If this is specified, it takes precedence over other forms of auto-detection. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level2-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level two. Each entry is added under the previous level one entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--level3-toc

XPath expression that specifies all tags that should be added to the Table of Contents at level three. Each entry is added under the previous level two entry. See the XPath Tutorial in the calibre User Manual for examples.

--max-toc-links

Maximum number of links to insert into the TOC. Set to 0 to disable. Default is: 50. Links are only added to the TOC if less than the threshold number of chapters were detected.

--no-chapters-in-toc

Don’t add auto-detected chapters to the Table of Contents.

--toc-filter

Remove entries from the Table of Contents whose titles match the specified regular expression. Matching entries and all their children are removed.

--toc-threshold

If fewer than this number of chapters is detected, then links are added to the Table of Contents. Default: 6

--use-auto-toc

Normally, if the source file already has a Table of Contents, it is used in preference to the auto-generated one. With this option, the auto-generated one is always used.

METADATA

Options to set metadata in the output

--author-sort

String to be used when sorting by author.

--authors

Set the authors. Multiple authors should be separated by ampersands.

--book-producer

Set the book producer.

--comments

Set the ebook description.

--cover

Set the cover to the specified file or URL

--isbn

Set the ISBN of the book.

--language

Set the language.

--pubdate

Set the publication date.

--publisher

Set the ebook publisher.

--rating

Set the rating. Should be a number between 1 and 5.

--series

Set the series this ebook belongs to.

--series-index

Set the index of the book in this series.

--tags

Set the tags for the book. Should be a comma separated list.

--timestamp

Set the book timestamp (no longer used anywhere)

--title

Set the title.

--title-sort

The version of the title to be used for sorting.

DEBUG

Options to help with debugging the conversion

--debug-pipeline, -d

Save the output from different stages of the conversion pipeline to the specified directory. Useful if you are unsure at which stage of the conversion process a bug is occurring.

--verbose, -v

Level of verbosity. Specify multiple times for greater verbosity.