[NTLK] Converting NewtonBooks to ePub

[Eric Brown]

> I've been looking at the NewtonBook binary format lately, trying to figure
> out if there's a reasonable way to extract book content from .pkg files and
> turn it into something readable on today's devices.

There totally is. The format isn’t that difficult to parse.

> Does anyone have deeper knowledge of the format ? especially the
> relationship between style runs and text content in book parts? I've been
> filling in the gaps by trial and error, but I'd rather not reinvent
> the wheel.


It’s been, ahem, a few years, but I ran a college level class that had parsing a Newton Book as a project. Here’s the archive of the project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20060904191234/http://metcs.bu.edu/~feneric/cs331/Archives/Project2002/

Some of the references are probably still findable with a little bit of poking around.

Additionally, some old C code for pulling raw text from Newton Books is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20050409064008/https://www.saugus.net/~eric/nb2txt/

Hope this helps,
Eric