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FB2 to EPUB

Your book never leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make this work. A FictionBook is one XML file, so there is nothing to unzip and no library to fetch.

…or drop one anywhere on this page.

The conversion people actually want, with the pictures kept.

An FB2 holds its illustrations inside itself, base64-encoded, so they can become real files inside the EPUB rather than disappearing. Most converters drop them. The sections become chapters, the table of contents is built from their titles, and the result follows every structural rule the format has — including the one that catches everybody, the mimetype entry first in the archive and stored uncompressed.

What a FictionBook is

One XML file holding the whole book: a <description> with the title, author and language, a <body> of nested <section> elements holding the text, and the pictures base64-encoded in <binary> elements at the end. No container and no manifest. Open one in a text editor and you can read it, which is more than can be said for most book formats.

A .fb2.zip is an ordinary ZIP with the FictionBook inside it — a great many library downloads come that way. Unzip it first and hand over the .fb2; this page will tell you if you give it the zipped one rather than failing without explanation.

FictionBook has no lists, and that is the format

There is no list element in FictionBook. Not an unordered one, not a numbered one, nothing — at any version anything actually implements. A bulleted list in an FB2 is a run of paragraphs each beginning with a bullet character, because that is the only way to write one, and every reader displays it that way.

So going in, a list is flattened to bulleted paragraphs and the number of items is reported. Coming out, a run of bulleted paragraphs is not guessed back into a list: a paragraph legitimately starting with a dash is common, and guessing wrongly rewrites somebody's book. This was settled by looking at what pandoc writes when pandoc makes an FB2, not by assuming.

What else does not come across

Footnotes come across as their own section at the end rather than attached to the places that refer to them — FictionBook keeps them in a separate body and matching each one back to its marker is work this does not do yet, so they are kept rather than guessed at.

There is no FB2 to PDF here, for the reason there is none anywhere on this site: a PDF fixes text to a page of a particular size and a book deliberately reflows, so something would have to choose your page size, your typeface and where every break falls. An e-reader or Calibre will do it with those choices in front of you.

Where to go next