ChmToMobi Module

It’s a year now since I bought Kindle for me. I have it still with me and frequently need to check PowerShell documentation. It led me to previous articles (1st and 2nd part) where I described in general, how to convert CHM file to MOBI. As I needed to automate it a bit, I created simple module for conversion process. Whole process is simple:

1. Download ZIP file and unzip in to your module folder.
2. Import module to your session (Import-Module chm2mobi).
3. Run Convert-ChmToMobi <your_chm_file>.
4. Copy MOBI to your e-reader and enjoy

To run it successfully, you need to have kindlegen installed on your computer and need to set alias kg to point to EXE file. On my PC I did it this way:

[11]: Get-Alias kg | ft -auto

CommandType Name Definition
----------- ---- ----------
Alias       kg   Dropbox:\Ruzne\KindleGen\kindlegen.exe

This is example output when generating file for PowerShell help topics (I recommend to use -Verbose parameter so you’ll see actual state of processing):

[16]: Convert-ChmToMobi .\PSHelp.chm

***********************************************
* Amazon.com kindlegen(Windows) V1.1 build 99 *
* A command line e-book compiler              *
* Copyright Amazon.com 2010                   *
***********************************************

opt version: try to minimize (default)
Info(prcgen): Added metadata dc:Title        "Title"
Info(prcgen): Added metadata dc:Date         "2011/09/11"
Info(prcgen): Added metadata dc:Creator      "moravec"
Info(prcgen): Added metadata dc:Subject      "Subject"
Info(prcgen): Added metadata dc:Description  "Description"
Info(prcgen): Parsing files  0000374
Warning(prcgen): <INPUT>, <SELECT> or <TEXTAREA> tag does no

Info(prcgen): Resolving hyperlinks
Info(prcgen): Resolving start reading location
Info(prcgen): Added metadata Start reading   "5098"
Info(prcgen): Computing UNICODE ranges used in the book
Info(prcgen): Found UNICODE range: Basic Latin [20..7E]
Info(prcgen): Found UNICODE range: General Punctuation - Windows 1252 [201C..201E]
Info(prcgen): Found UNICODE range: Latin-1 Supplement [A0..FF]
Info(prcgen): Building MOBI file, record count:   0001986
Info(prcgen): Compiling HTML Parser restart information
Info(prcgen): Final stats - text compressed to (in % of original size):  040.46%
Info(prcgen): The document identifier is: "Title"
Info(prcgen): The file format version is V6
Info(prcgen): Saving MOBI file
Info(prcgen): MOBI File successfully generated!

There are still some points I need to update or change. For example:

• Easily add own Subject and Description.
• Resolve problems when kindlegen alias not presented.
• Add more control over generating files – generate only some files.
• Not show kindlegen output when not requested.
• Remove files at the end when requested.