Sixth Release Delayed · 10:47am Oct 8th, 2014
The next update of Fimfarchive will be delayed due to the changes in Fimfiction's EPUB exporter. I don't know for how long yet, but will keep you posted about that. Rest assured that I will keep releasing updates to the archive. Now, there are a few issues I would like some feedback on.
.ePubs have had their support slightly improved; cover images should now work, and bbcode is now stripped from the story so that they should now display properly on more devices. In the future, full bbcode formatting support will return.
The first issue is that EPUB files exported by Fimfiction now include cover images. I'm planning to remove these images from stories added to the archive. The reason being the amount of space they take up. Take The Greatest Equine Who has Ever Lived as an example. The size of the cover image is 150 KB, thus changing the size of the story from 4 KB to 153 KB. Assuming that each story has a 150 KB cover image, the size of the archive would grow by more than 13 GB! I cannot justify making the archive seven times larger just because of cover images.
The second issue is the temporary loss of formatting in the EPUB files. The consistency of the archive has always been pretty important to me. I've kept the stories that are no longer available up to date with styling changes made to Fimfiction's EPUB exporter. Had the consistency been the most important thing I could probably have written a script which purges the formatting from currently unavailable stories. Removing formatting from the archive would be a very serious regression to me though.
Before anyone complains to Fimfiction about that, their decision makes sense. The old EPUB exporter would generate files that many e-readers had trouble displaying because of their formatting. The e-readers would simply cut off the chapters once they came across invalid formatting. I solved this problem for myself by processing the stories through Calibre before putting them on my e-reader. Not everyone would do or even know how to do that though, thus ending up missing part of the story. According to FaceDeer this was a problem caused by formatting spanning several paragraphs, instead of being configured per paragraph. Hopefully Fimfiction will be able to sort out the formatting issues quickly.
Keep in mind that this does not only affect the next version of the archive, but all future versions as well. For example, consider a story that was updated and therefore lost its formatting. The author decides to remove this story before formatting was added back, causing it to become unavailable. There might be no way for me to restore the formatting for new chapters, and doing so for old chapters would require a lot of work.
I suppose I could look into how the HTML exporter and EPUB exporter compare to one another. Perhaps it would be possible to generate EPUB files using the HTML exporter data. However, that would also require a lot of work.
Eiter way, I will try to contact the Fimfiction staff regarding these issues. I will do so next week when (hopefully) things have calmed down a bit for them. The optimal thing for me would be if they could make the legacy EPUB exporter available until the new one gains formatting support. This archive is in no way anything official to Fimfiction, but hopefully I can manage to get a response.
There are two options for a quick update, if you would prefer that to a proper fix.
1. Do a partial update. Keep the formatting for unavailable stories, and for stories that have had no updates. Fetch new or updated stories, which would lose their formatting.
2. Do a complete update. Keep the formatting for unavailable stories. Fetch all available stories, which would lose their formatting.
