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Creating a kindle dictionary

I am trying to create a Kindle dictionary that can be used for offline lookup. I already have the words and their inflections, but turning this into a working dictionary is difficult.
There is some documentation about this provided by Amazon. It basically says that you should:
Create an XHTML file with their special markup specifying all inflections etc.
Turn it into an epub
Open it with Kindle Previewer
Export it with Kindle Previewer to MOBI
So I created a large XHTML file (23 MB or so) according to the Amazon specifications and opened it in Kindle Previewer, and it looked fine. However, Kindle Previewer does not let you export XHTML files to MOBI. They want you to create an intermediate epub file.
I tried using Pandoc to do the conversion, which did not work because it stripped out all the specific HTML tags and only left in paragraphs. Then I tried using calibre. The normal XHTML -> epub conversion failed because the XHTML file was too large, according to an error message. Calibre suggests to turn on the "heuristic mode" if you run into this error, which I tried, but which did not finish running after hours of runtime.
Then I attempted to create the epub file myself, using a sample file taken from this tutorial. I discovered that this is not trivial, and a check using epubcheck revealed many hard-to-understand errors in my generated file. The generation of the epub file is also a bit complicated by the fact that you probably need to split the XHTML files into many smaller files, which should maybe be 250 kb in size, because e-readers tend to struggle with parsing larger files.
So I thought there should maybe be an easier way to do this, or maybe a library that helps doing this. Maybe it would even be a good idea to output the words + inflections into some other easier dictionary format and then convert it to a MOBI using an existing library and leaving out the XHTML generation completely. Currently I am using Python, but I'd also use other languages if it is necessary. What could I try?
Edit: To add to the things I have tried: there is an apparently closed source script here that unfortunately doesn't support inflections, so does not work. And there are instructions here that advise converting the file to PRC using Mobipocket Creator and then opening it with Kindle Previewer. The problem with this approach is that Kindle Previewer throws the error:
Kindle Previewer does not support this file, which has either been created using an older version of KindleGen or a third party application. We recommend using EPUB or DOCX format directly for previewing and publishing your book on Kindle.
There are also more detailed instructions for Mobipocket Creator here, which tell you to directly move the generated .prc file onto the kindle. I tried that but it is not being recognized as a dictionary.

I figured it out by myself. First I implemented a solution myself, then I found the pyglossary library (right now the code below only works with the version from Github and not from pip) and used it like this:
from pyglossary.glossary import Glossary
Glossary.init()
glos = Glossary()
defiFormat = "h"
base_forms = get_base_forms()
for canonical_form in base_forms:
inflections = get_inflections(canonical_form)
definitions = get_definition(canonical_form)
definitionhtml = ""
for definition in definitions:
definitionhtml += "<p>" + gloss + "</p>"
all_forms = [canonical_form]
all_forms.extend(inflections)
glos.addEntryObj(glos.newEntry(all_forms, glosshtml, defiFormat))
glos.setInfo("title", "Russian-English Dictionary")
glos.setInfo("author", "Vuizur")
glos.sourceLangName = "Russian"
glos.targetLangName = "English"
glos.write("test.mobi", format="Mobi", keep=True, kindlegen_path="path/to/kindlegen.exe")

How to parse a .shp file?

I am interested in gleaning information from an ESRI .shp file.
Specifically the .shp file of a polyline feature class.
When I open the .dbf of a feature class, I get what I would expect: a table that can open in excel and contains the information from the feature class' table.
However, when I try to open a .shp file in any program (excel, textpad, etc...) all I get is a bunch of gibberish and unusual ASCII characters.
I would like to use Python (2.x) to interpret this file and get information out of it (in this case the vertices of the polyline).
I do not want to use any modules or non built-in tools, as I am genuinely interested in how this process would work and I don't want any dependencies.
Thank you for any hints or points in the right direction you can give!

Your question, basically, is "I have a file full of data stored in an arbitrary binary format. How can I use python to read such a file?"
The answer is, this link contains a description of the format of the file. Write a dissector based on the technical specification.

If you don't want to go to all the trouble of writing a parser, you should take look at pyshp, a pure Python shapefile library. I've been using it for a couple of months now, and have found it quite easy to use.
There's also a python binding to shapelib, if you search the web. But I found the pure Python solution easier to hack around with.

might be a long shot, but you should check out ctypes, and maybe use the .dll file that came with a program (if it even exists lol) that can read that type of file. in my experience, things get weird when u start digging around .dlls

HTML to RTF string using Python

I am looking for a way to convert HTML text to RTF string. Is there any libraries that does this job. I get html content dynamically in my project and need it to be rendered in RTF format. I am using HTML parser to convert HTML text to normal string and then have trying to use PyRTF for conversion to RTF format. Is there any better way that this can be done.Thanks in advance.

RTF seems a dicey format to convert from/to. I've tried cutting and pasting among applications on Mac OS X, for example, where RTF is something of a lingua franca. Some of those apps are Microsoft apps (relevant in that RTF is a Microsoft-developed format), others are not. Even basic formatting information like font size, font face, line spacing, and list styling (ordered or unordered) is jumbled when copying from one ostensibly RTF-speaking app to another. Simply put, it's a mess.
I have searched for ways to programmatically read, write, and transform RTF, preferably from Python. I found a number of packages on PyPI, trying them out has been a disappointing experience. They would support RTF 1.5, say, when the current version is 1.9.1. RTF has been around a long time, but a 2005-vintage spec is not very recent. There were lots of gotchas and incompatibilities. LOTS.
Now, I'm not saying it's impossible, or that there aren't other libraries out there that would do the trick. I have not tried the zopyx.convert mentioned by others here, for example. Maybe it's great. But looking at its dependencies--Java, FOP, etc.--it looks like a pretty complex (and thus likely fragile) toolchain. I read its code on github, and the Python is really only there as a coordination veneer. It organizes external tools XFC, XINC, FOP, and PrinceXML--three of the four of which are commercial software. That includes the key XFC part that deals with RTF. Color me skeptical.
There are two converters that I've found are worth a look: If you're using a Mac, the textutil command line program is actually one of the better and simpler tools I've seen.
textutil -convert html filename.rtf -output filename.html
The other formatting engine that's worth considering is LibreOffice. It's free, open source, reasonably amenable to automation, and a decent foundation as an interoperability hub. That's not just a guess; I've built complex, multi-format document workflows around it.
I would question why you're trying to get into RTF. That seems like a document format you'd be trying to escape from. But if you need to go there, textutil and LibreOffice are the least-worst mechanisms I've found.

There is a wonderful python library that comes as a tarball.
You can download it at https://pypi.python.org/pypi/zopyx.convert2/2.4.5.
Good luck!

I see this question is over a year old, but figured I'd contribute anyway. I recently had a similar requirement, and turned to PyRTF, a small but powerful Python module that can construct RTF documents from a text file. You could use Beautiful Soup to scrape the HTML, going down the parse tree tag by tag, and use the PyRTF API to construct appropriate objects (table, cell, paragraph, section or document).
The API itself is quite granular, and allows for a whole bunch of custom formatting (font text, alignment, color, headers, footers etc.)
Hope this helps.

create office files from python

We have a project in python with django.
We need to generate complex word, excel and pdf files.
For the rest of our projects which were done in PHP we used PHPexcel ,
PHPWord and tcpdf for PDF.
What libraries for python would you recommend for creating this kind of files ? (for excel and word its imortant to use the open xml file format xlsx , docx)

Python-docx may help ( https://github.com/mikemaccana/python-docx ).
Python doesn't have highly-developed tools to manipulate word documents. I've found the java library xdocreport ( https://code.google.com/p/xdocreport/ ) to be the best by far for Word reporting. Because I need to generate PCL, which is efficiently done via FOP I also use docx4j.
To integrate this with my python, I use the spark framework to wrap it up with a simple web service, and use requests on the python side to talk to the service.

For excel, there's openpyxl, which actually is a python port of PHPexcel, afaik. I haven't used it yet, but it sounds ok to me.

I would recommend using Docutils. It takes reStructuredText files and converts them to a range of output files. Included in the package are HTML, LaTeX and .odf file writers but in the sandbox there are a whole load of other writers for writing to other formats, see for example, the WordML writer (disclaimer: I haven't used it).
The advantage of this solution is that you can write plain text (reStructuredText) master files, which are human readable as is, and then convert to a range of other file formats as required.
Whilst not a Python solution, you should also look at Pandoc a Haskell library which supports a much wider range of output and input formats than docutils. One major advantage of Pandoc over Docutils is that you can do the reverse translation, i.e. WordML to reStructuredText. You can try Pandoc here.

I have never used any libraries for this, but you can change the extension of any docx, xlsx file to zip, and see the magic!
Generating openxml files is as simple as generating couple of XML files (you can use templates) and zipping it.

Simplest way to generate PDF is to generate HTML (with CSS+images) and convert it using wkhtmltopdf tool.

What program to write pdf including other pdf on Linux from Python?

On an Ubuntu server, I want to create pdfs which include other static pdfs. I have tried using ReportLab with pyPdf. Ideally I would use ReportLab to do the whole thing, but in order to import the pdfs requires their PageCatcher which has a large recurring fee.
So I use pyPdf to merge a page created with ReportLab and my other pdfs. The problem is that even though this looks fine in Acrobat and Foxit, part of one of the pages prints garbled on a Xerox 7400 color printer. I can't figure out the issue, but would be willing to buy a more integrated solution if it existed and was reasonably priced. I thought PDF Creator Pilot was it until I saw that it was Windows only.
So is there a reasonably priced ($1K or less) solution or a different suggestion?

I have had a lot of success with the Java library iText. They have a great library of samples for pretty much anything you could think of doing with PDF files. This example is for concatenating PDF files and sounds like it would do what you need: http://itextpdf.com/examples/index.php?page=example&id=123. There is also PDFBox which is another great Java based PDF manipulation library.
I realize that you are looking for a Python based solution but there may not be many other options. If you are using the Jython interpreter instead of CPython, integrating in iText should be trivial. If not, then you could consider calling out to it as a separate process. I realize that may not be idea for your situation but I figured I would mention it as an option.

Another non-Python answer. If you are just merging pages, then pdftk does that well (along with a lot of other things).