It seems like recently there have been updates to the way epubs are imported. It separates the chapters into individual lessons, which is nice, but it seems to have introduced many errors. Whenever I import epubs now it pushes words together so they show up as new words. Here are some examples from a recent French epub I uploaded
parlesoleil - instead of “par le soleil”
cespetits - instead of “ces petits”
pours’envoler - instead of “pour s’envoler”
This is really annoying and these were all from the same paragraph. It’s making me not want to use lingq anymore since I mostly like to read books I import as epubs.
Are there ways to fix or prevent this? Is there a coming update that will fix this problem? Have other people had this problem recently?
I have imported tons of epubs in the past and not had any problems. It seems like the quality of Lingq is falling rapidly.
We are unable to reproduce this problem on our end.
Could you please provide the file you imported to support@lingq.com and let us know what your dictionary language is? Thanks!
Sometimes to get EPUBs to work properly in LingQ I need to convert them to plain text first using Calibre (a free program) or similar software. TXT files are also accepted by LingQ for upload/importing and that seems to fix some of the formatting issues with EPUBs.
It has something to do with what is being used as a space in those ePUBs.
It will not be visible when reading the book but there is something else being used instead of a space. If you use calibre and edit the book it shows up as these gray boxes in calibre (refer to screenshot below).
The first screenshot shows the problem and last screenshot is from Calibre when editing the book.
You can fix the the problem with the book using calibre before importing by using using “find and replace” to replace the gray box with a proper space.
I am experiencing the same issue, these gray boxes are not there in this case, what seems to be happening for me here is the sections where the space is not recognized are at line breaks. I’ll email the file used to support@lingq.com soon, but I believe this did not happen before.
I did encounter something like this before but I don’t remember lingQ joining up 2 words into 1 after import. They usually end up with line break in the middle of sentences inside LingQ.
In the meantime, while waiting for LingQ to solve it automatically. Inside Calibre, you can use Find and Replace to replace " \n " with space.
To make the ePub html source look nice again. Go to tool → beautify all files.
Below are the things I do before importing into lingQ all this is done in edit book mode except for the Modify ePub plugins.
Remove those weird grey boxes and replace with space.
Remove line breaks between sentences, replace \n with space
Split each chapter/section into a separate file (the option is at the bottom of file preview window) after that I Build/edit the table of content.
I also remove unused CCS rules, fix html, check book, (all under tools menu)
Some books have these huge decorative first charater for the first word in each chapter, those I had to fix manually.
I also use a plugin called Modify ePub which can help to fix ePub files too. You can install it from under Preference.
Just to add, other plugins I use inside calibre
Quality Check plugin but I have only used it to fix stuff in my Calibre library of books.
EpubSplit, If you have huge series in 1 book you can use this to split them up. Sometime big books don’t import into LingQ.
I also use Count Pages plugin not for it feature to count pages but for it ability to display Readability score for each of my books. This help me sort the books according to difficulty. So I don’t waste time importing a book that is too difficult to read. I am not sure if the score is technically accurate for my TL(french) but it seems accurate when I try to read the books. Better than nothing. Screenshot below.
Maybe some day someone will create a plugin that cleans up and fix a ePub and upload it to LingQ directly from Calibre.
Calibre can also generate AI TTS audio for books which I currently have to upload to lingQ manually. Hope to see LingQ support ePub with embedded audio someday.
