# 2024-08-13 - EPUB2TXT, Convert EPUB To Plain Text On DOS
       
       Recently I wrote an XML parser in AWK [1].
       
       I let it loose into the black abyss of DOS.  It came back with books
       in a bag of holding.
       
       Now i am announcing epub2txt.awk, a script to convert EPUB files to
       plain text for reading on DOS.  It it relies on a bunch of utilities
       to do this conversion.  The only one i modified was UTF8TOCP.COM from
       FreeDOS.  I changed it to decode unknown Unicode codepoints into
       \uHHHH and \UHHHHHHHH formats instead of just '?'.
       
       It takes patience because the script can run for a long time.
       Once completed, it produces several outputs.
       
       The plaintxt/ directory contains short 8.3 filenames for all of the
       images used in the EPUB; index.txt is UTF-8 encoded; index.dos is
       CP437 encoded, has hard wrapped paragraphs, and has ASCII-art
       transliterations for some Unicode codepoints.
       
       The plaintxt/ directory would be a good one to zip up for viewing
       on any DOS machine.
       
       index.html gives a table of contents to read the EPUB content in
       a web browser.  In FreeDOS i can view this with inline images by
       running:
       
           links -g -mode 1024x768x256 index.html
       
       I tested epub2txt [2] with nawk on FreeDOS 1.3 and MS-DOS 6.22.  I
       tested it with gawk, mawk, and nawk on Slackware 15.  I advise
       running on Unix if possible, then copying plaintxt over to DOS for
       viewing.
       
       See below [3] to view the source code.
       
       See the directions in README.TXT and have fun!
       
       p.s. 
       
       I found a very similar project written in C [4].  It is very fast.
       It does not include references to images and external links.  See
       link below for code and details.
       
       tags: bencollver,retrocomputing,technical
       
       # Footnotes
       
 (DIR) [1] XML parser in AWK
       
 (DIR) [2] epub2txt for DOS
       
 (HTM) [3] epub2txt source code
       
 (DIR) [4] epub2txt2 converter written in C
       
       # Tags
       
 (DIR) bencollver
 (DIR) retrocomputing
 (DIR) technical