Vegan Cream Cheese Doesn't Start Out Expired

December 1, 2012 5:48 AM

Adding recipes from a digital cookbook to a digital recipe universe: how to? (iOS 10 filter)

(Previously)

I have most of the recipes I want to try in Kindle cookbooks, but keeping track of them while juggling the usual responsibilities of mom + full-time geek + wife + pet herder is proving beyond my capabilities. I'm a visual organizer, so having everything available in one place will allow me to plan and cook meals more efficiently.

Thing is, all the software I've tried so far (well, I tried Sous Chef) can't import recipes from Kindle books. MacGourmet doesn't appear to be able to do it either, judging from their FAQs and support fora. They'll import from text, but the text that ends up in their importer doesn't work like a text editor; when you select a block of text, it looks like the importer thinks the text on the screen is an image so you are scraping text from an image rather than selecting lines that wrap.

Where can I find Mac software that can import from Kindle books? Anyone have any luck doing this? I don't mind paying $50 for MacGourmet if someone here in the Hive Mind can vouch for it working properly. (I trust y'all infinitely more than some website dedicated to sales.)

posted by tigerjade to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: MacGourmet is available for OS X (a Mac computer) or for iOS (an iPad or an iPhone). I'm assuming you mean that you're doing this on OS X using Kindle.app, right?

the text that ends up in their importer doesn't work like a text editor; when you select a block of text, it looks like the importer thinks the text on the screen is an image so you are scraping text from an image rather than selecting lines that wrap.

I have been using MacGourmet for years (with over a thousand recipes that I've added) and I don't understand your description here at all. In my experience, text that has been copied and pasted comes in perfectly cleanly and the application has no trouble importing it. Sometimes you have to do a little manual finagling if the recipe is formatted in a complicated way (like Cake Ingredients, Cake Directions, Frosting Ingredients, Frosting Directions), but I can't imagine any automated way around something like that.

I usually only import from websites, PDFs, text files, and the like. But I just tried it with a block of text from a Kindle book and it looked fine to me. Copying text from Kindle.app is a little clunky (you have to do a single page at a time, sometimes the cursor jumps around, etc) but it's not that bad. It did add a citation at the end of the copied block saying where it was copied from, but you can just delete that line.

Do you have a screenshot or other description of what's not working right? Do you have a simple text editor like Text Wrangler that you can use to clean up the text first?
posted by bcwinters at 10:04 AM on December 1, 2012

Response by poster: You just outed me as an idiot to the entire Hive Mind! :) Seriously, I didn't even think of going with a go-between to fix the text up. It was copying as one long line, so in the importer it was wrapped, and the importer doesn't do wrapped.

Perfect! And now that I know MacGourmet works well with importing from the Kindle app, I think I'll switch while I'm at it.
posted by tigerjade at 2:27 AM on December 3, 2012