allmark

Universal eBook → Markdown converter and cleaner. Handles all formats, all artifacts, all chapter styles automatically.

Transform your entire eBook library into clean, readable Markdown files with a single command. allmark intelligently strips away the cruft—frontmatter, backmatter, headers, footers, page numbers, and metadata—leaving only the pure narrative content.

✨ Features

Core Capabilities

• 📚 Universal Format Support: Convert 40+ formats to clean Markdown (10 verified: EPUB, HTML, DOCX, PDF, TXT, MD, RTF, ODT, LaTeX, RST)
• 🧹 Intelligent Cleaning: Automatically removes frontmatter, backmatter, headers, footers, page numbers
• 🔧 OCR Repair: Fixes broken hyphenation, ligatures, and common OCR artifacts
• 📖 Chapter Detection: Standardizes chapter markers across different formats
• 🎯 Artifact Removal: Strips ebook metadata, CSS classes, Calibre IDs, and other cruft
• 🛡️ Safety First: Never removes more than 50% of content (built-in safety check)
• 📊 Progress Tracking: SQLite database logs all conversions with statistics
• 📄 JSONL Export: Token-based text chunking for ML/AI training datasets
• 🎛️ Flexible Splitting: Paragraph-aware or strict token boundary splitting
• 🏷️ Custom Metadata: Add arbitrary metadata to JSONL records

What Makes allmark Different?

• Statistical Analysis: Uses document structure analysis to intelligently identify and remove non-content sections
• Dialogue-Aware: Preserves paragraph breaks in dialogue while merging broken narrative paragraphs
• Format Agnostic: Same great results whether your source is a scanned PDF or a modern EPUB
• Zero Configuration: Works out of the box with sensible defaults
• Batch Processing: Convert entire libraries with a single command
• ML-Ready Output: Direct JSONL export with configurable chunk sizes for training datasets

📦 Installation

Quick Install (pip)

pip install git+https://github.com/dcondrey/allmark.git

Development Install

Using pip:

git clone https://github.com/dcondrey/allmark.git
cd allmark
pip install -e .

Using Poetry:

git clone https://github.com/dcondrey/allmark.git
cd allmark
poetry install
poetry shell

Using Conda:

git clone https://github.com/dcondrey/allmark.git
cd allmark
conda env create -f environment.yml
conda activate allmark

🔧 Requirements

allmark has zero Python dependencies - uses only Python stdlib!

External Tools

Tool	Purpose	Required?
pandoc	EPUB, DOCX converter	✅ Yes
pdftotext (poppler)	PDF text extraction	✅ Yes
ebook-convert (Calibre)	FB2, MOBI fallback	⚠️ Optional

PDF Extraction:

• Uses pdftotext with -layout mode (preserves formatting)
• Falls back to -raw mode if layout fails
• Final fallback to ebook-convert if both fail

Installing External Dependencies

macOS (Homebrew)

brew install pandoc poppler
brew install --cask calibre  # optional

Ubuntu/Debian

sudo apt-get install pandoc poppler-utils
sudo apt-get install calibre  # optional

Windows (Chocolatey)

choco install pandoc poppler
choco install calibre  # optional

🚀 Quick Start

Get Help

allmark
# or
allmark --help

Basic Conversion

# Convert all ebooks in a directory (with intelligent cleaning)
allmark --in /path/to/ebooks

# Output goes to same directory by default
# Verified formats: .epub, .html, .docx, .pdf, .txt, .md, .rtf, .odt, .tex, .rst
# Additional (with Calibre): .mobi, .azw3, .kf8, .fb2, .djvu

Common Use Cases

📚 Convert entire library to Markdown

allmark --in ~/Books --out ~/Books-Markdown

🤖 Create ML training dataset with JSONL

# Convert to JSONL with 1024 token chunks
allmark --in ./books --jsonl --token-size 1024

# With custom metadata for training
allmark --in ./books --jsonl --metadata ./book_info.json

Example book_info.json:

{
  "genre": "science_fiction",
  "language": "en",
  "dataset": "training_v1"
}

📄 Convert without cleaning (preserve everything)

allmark --in ./books --no-strip
# Keeps: frontmatter, backmatter, headers, footers, page numbers, metadata

⚡ Strict token splitting for exact chunk sizes

allmark --in ./books --jsonl --token-size 512 --strict-split
# Splits at exact token boundaries, ignoring paragraph breaks

📖 Usage

Command-Line Options

Option	Description	Default
--in, --input <dir>	Input directory containing ebook files	Required
--out, --output <dir>	Output directory for markdown files	Same as --in
--no-strip	Skip cleaning (preserve all content)	Cleaning enabled
--force	Force reconversion of existing files	Skip existing
--no-clean-md	Skip cleaning existing .md files	Clean .md files
--db <path>	Conversion log database path	./conversion_log.db
--jsonl	Also create JSONL output with chunks	Markdown only
--token-size <n>	Max tokens per JSONL chunk	512
--strict-split	Split at exact token boundaries	Paragraph-aware
--metadata <file>	JSON file with custom metadata for JSONL	None

Examples by Use Case

# Example 1: Basic conversion with cleaning
allmark --in ./ebooks

# Example 2: Separate output directory
allmark --in ./source-books --out ./clean-markdown

# Example 3: Raw conversion (no cleaning)
allmark --in ./books --no-strip

# Example 4: Force reconversion
allmark --in ./books --force

# Example 5: Create ML training dataset
allmark --in ./books --jsonl --token-size 1024 --metadata ./metadata.json

# Example 6: Custom everything
allmark --in ./books --out ./md --db ~/conversion.db --force

JSONL Output Format

When using --jsonl, each record contains:

{
  "text": "Chunk of narrative text...",
  "chunk_index": 0,
  "total_chunks": 25,
  "token_count": 487,
  "source_file": "book.epub",
  "markdown_file": "book.md",
  "split_mode": "paragraph_aware",
  // ... plus any custom metadata from --metadata file
  "genre": "fiction",
  "language": "en"
}

How It Works

allmark processes files through a comprehensive pipeline:

1. Format Conversion: Uses pandoc/pdftotext to convert to markdown
2. OCR Repair: Fixes broken hyphens, ligatures, soft hyphens
3. Artifact Removal: Strips images, links, CSS classes, ebook metadata
4. Code Block Detection: Removes non-literary code/markup blocks
5. Header/Footer Removal: Statistical detection of repeating elements
6. Page Number Removal: Multiple pattern matching
7. TOC Removal: Detects and removes table of contents
8. Document Analysis: Understands prose density and narrative structure
9. Frontmatter/Backmatter Trimming: Removes copyright pages, author bios, etc.
10. Chapter Standardization: Normalizes chapter markers to # Chapter N
11. Typography Normalization: Fixes quotes, dashes, ellipses
12. Markdown Validation: Ensures proper markdown formatting
13. Paragraph Merging: Intelligently rejoins broken paragraphs

Project Structure

allmark/
├── src/
│   └── allmark/
│       ├── __init__.py       # Package initialization
│       ├── __main__.py       # CLI entry point
│       ├── cli.py            # Command-line interface
│       ├── converter.py      # Main conversion logic
│       ├── cleaners.py       # Text cleaning functions
│       ├── analyzers.py      # Document analysis
│       ├── ocr.py            # OCR artifact repair
│       └── utils.py          # Utility functions
├── setup.py                  # pip installation
├── pyproject.toml           # Modern Python packaging
├── environment.yml          # Conda environment
└── README.md                # This file

Development

Setting up Development Environment

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/dcondrey/allmark.git
cd allmark

# Create virtual environment
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate  # On Windows: venv\Scripts\activate

# Install in editable mode with dev dependencies
pip install -e ".[dev]"

# OR: Install with pinned dev dependencies for reproducible environment
pip install -r requirements-dev.txt
pip install -e .

Running Tests

pytest
pytest --cov=allmark  # with coverage

Code Formatting

black src/

Linting

flake8 src/
mypy src/

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Here's how you can help:

1. Report bugs: Open an issue with details and reproduction steps
2. Suggest features: Share your ideas via GitHub issues
3. Submit PRs: Fork, create a feature branch, and submit a pull request
4. Improve docs: Help make the documentation clearer

See Development Guide for setup instructions.

📝 License

MIT License - see LICENSE file for details.

Copyright (c) 2025 David Condrey

💬 Support & Community

• Issues: GitHub Issues
• Discussions: GitHub Discussions
• Documentation: This README and inline code documentation

🙏 Acknowledgments

Built with:

• Pandoc - Universal document converter
• Poppler - PDF rendering and text extraction
• Python standard library - Zero Python dependencies!

📊 Project Stats

• Python Dependencies: 0 (pure stdlib!)
• Verified Formats: 10 formats (EPUB, HTML, DOCX, PDF, TXT, MD, RTF, ODT, LaTeX, RST)
• Additional Formats: 30+ with Calibre (MOBI, AZW3, KF8, DjVu, legacy formats)
• Cleaning Stages: 17-stage intelligent pipeline
• Safety Checks: Never removes >50% of content
• Output Formats: Markdown, JSONL
• Test Coverage: Coming soon!

📚 Format Support

Tier 1: Verified & Tested ✅

These formats work out-of-the-box with just Pandoc + poppler-utils:

• EPUB (.epub, .epub3) - Modern ebooks
• HTML (.html, .htm, .xhtml) - Web pages
• DOCX (.docx) - Microsoft Word 2007+
• PDF (.pdf) - Portable documents
• TXT/MD (.txt, .text, .md) - Plain text
• RTF (.rtf) - Rich text format
• ODT (.odt) - LibreOffice documents
• LaTeX (.tex, .latex) - Academic documents
• RST (.rst) - Python documentation

Tier 2: With Calibre 🟡

Requires brew install calibre or apt install calibre:

• MOBI (.mobi) - Mobipocket/Kindle
• AZW3/KF8 (.azw3, .kf8) - Amazon Kindle
• FB2 (.fb2) - FictionBook (Russian format)
• DjVu (.djvu) - Scanned documents (also needs djvulibre)

Tier 3: Legacy Formats ⚠️

Implemented but untested (require Calibre):

• Microsoft Reader (.lit), Sony Reader (.lrf), Palm (.pdb, .pml, .prc)
• RocketBook (.rb), TomeRaider (.tcr), XPS (.xps)
• And 15+ other obsolete formats from the 2000s

Total: 40+ formats supported in code, 10 verified working, 15 example files

See examples/ directory for test files in 15 different formats!

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Made with ❤️ for book lovers and data scientists