All books blank!
Sun, 12/21/2008 - 10:04 — frelkins
Hi!
I have a lot of ebooks in PDF (some in French) I want to move to my iPhone Stanza. But when I open these PDFs in Stanza desktop, the page is blank, just blank. These PDFs are text files, not images, so Stanza should be able to display them. But page after page is just BLANK. I can save them to other formats such as Kindle and the .azw files will show a reasonable size. Stanza is reading and handling these works but NOT DISPLAYING THE TEXT. Help! Does this latest release of Stanza Desktop work? I'm on OSX 10.4.10. Thanks.
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How do I obtain a book using your desktop application?
see subject - my Stanza screen is blank and I see no mechanism for obtaining a book using the desktop application. No problem on the iPhone to do so.
The other person posting was
The other person posting was having a problem viewing her pdf files. Stanza Desktop is supposed with a blank screen:
http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/blank_screen_on_startup
To get books, you can download them from various sources on the web, and then open them in Stanza Desktop:
http://www.lexcycle.com/faq/where_to_get_books
You can also use Stanza Desktop to read your own pdfs, Word docs, text files, etc.
aargh!
Hi Emily!
I have ensured that I do not have white-on-white text. None of your solutions work for me, including saving to .txt. Blankness all over.
The only way text displays is if I try to print it - then I can see the first page only, it will not scroll. This is tragic because your iPhone app works great, but your desktop product doesn't seem to work at all. I decided maybe my files were all bad, so I went to fictionwise to download a free ebook, but their website doesn't work either - the Sherlock Holmes book never appeared on my bookshelf page for download. It's depressing.
Thanks for trying, but desktop Stanza just isn't ready for primetime and neither is the fictionwise website. Love the iPhone app tho, will use that!
Fortune
I am sorry it's not working
I am sorry it's not working for you, but since I was able to open it with no problems, it's hard for me to guess what's wrong. I've talked to our engineers, and they said it might because of your using Tiger. They also wondered whether you had altered the Layout options to see what happens then and whether you had tried deleting and reinstalling Stanza.
A lot of people have success converting books to epub (a format readable by Stanza Desktop and Stanza iPhone) using Calibre:
http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/
Give it a try, and you might be able to get your books into epub so that you can transfer them to your iPhone using Sharing on Stanza Desktop.
We would like to hear more about your Fictionwise experience. Fictionwise doesn't have many free books, and their website usually works smoothly, so it's surprising. It's also not possible to read most Fictionwise books in Stanza Desktop. If you get a chance, drop us a line with what you did and how you ran into problems with that. Thanks!
blank books
Hi Emily:
No, the books don't display text in the .azw format either, altho' the file is 248k, so i know the text is there. I tried your suggestion with the New From Clipboard and when I try that I get an error message! Good! It says "Could not load book: Java Num Lang format exception for string: 3221220328"
In short, Stanza just hates my french ebooks. would you like one of the files to play with yourself?
Thanks,
F
Yes, it would be very helpful
Yes, it would be very helpful to have one of the files. I'll email you. Thanks!
So you can open the pdf in
So you can open the pdf in Stanza and even though you see nothing, you can export it as Kindle, and then open the .azw file and see text. Is that right?
You can always copy the text of your pdf, launch Stanza, and then select "New From Clipboard" in the File menu. That will almost certainly cause text to be displayed. Then share that new document with your iPhone.
By the way, since we've never heard of this problem, can you tell me whether you have you tried doing a Save As... with your seemingly blank file and then opening that new file in Stanza Desktop? Have you tried sharing the book with your iPhone even though you can't see anything in Stanza Desktop? Thanks!