When browsing .epub file (a zip file variant) I want to completely extract the .epub file to a temporary directory on double click instead of just extracting each xhtml file (inside the epub) that I double click on to separate temporary folders. Because .epub files are like websites, the separate xhtml files don't work well without the other assets like images, styles.
I tried the Auto-extract archive contents on double-click option for .epub files but it didn't seem to do anything. Any help is greatly appreciated!
I ticked the "Prompt before extracting" and a prompt never came when I double clicked a xhtml file and when checked the temporary folder it only contained the xhtml file I clicked on.
Wow. I didn't think to change the separator because it didn't cause a problem when I added ",.epub" to Zip Extensions: in the Zip files settings. I didn't even notice that the separator was a semicolon until you pointed it out.
It's working brilliantly now! Thanks for all your support!
It seems that dopus creates new temporary folder each and every time a file inside an archive is double clicked. It would me more efficient if dopus has a way to check and not extract same file/archive twice.
In my case dopus extracts the entire .epub each time I double click on a .xhtml file inside it. This results in lot of redundancy and loss of efficiency.
(The top four folders in the ss was created when I opened 4 xhtml files with auto extract.)
It's not really problem as long as I don't double click on lot of files inside the same archive and I can avoid double clicking more than once if there is a table of contents file inside the epub. If there is no workaround I could always just extract it to a folder and delete it after use (though I hate doing that more than I should).
If there's a way to tell Firefox* to open a particular file inside the epub without extracting anything first, you should be able to make that happen on double-click and avoid the extraction entirely.
I don't know Firefox well enough to know if that's possible, though.
(*Or a dedicated ebook viewer, which would presumably provide something similar via command line arguments.)
The extraction can't be avoided before viewing the file. But extracting same archive twice should be avoided. Ebook viewers (like calibre) extract the archive temporary just like what I'm trying to do here.
Firefox doesn't natively support .epub/.zip files unlike pdf files.
The temp folders are automatically deleted after a while so I wouldn't worry about them.
We make a new one each time as we have no way to know if the files are still in their original states or were modified by whatever was run the previous time. (To work that out, we'd have to extract the files and compare them, which doesn't really help if the aim is to avoid extracting them. That or hash them, which isn't much quicker.)
It's more designed for zipped installers than for making things that don't understand epub files able to view them.
In my case the files don't get modified by my actions but the temporary files do seem to get deleted after while so I can understand the need to extract them again. Thanks for your time!
