ZimFiction - A tool for converting fanfiction dumps into ZIMs

Hi everyone,

I've created a tool for converting fanfiction dumps into ZIM files. You can find the github page here. Basically, this tool allows you to take a source of fanfiction (or other fiction in similar format) like a data dump containing stories and generate a ZIM file containing the stories as well as advanced search&filter capabilities.

It's probably over-engineered for what it does as it contains a lot of extra functionality used to empower the search&filter even more while keeping the build process somewhat efficient. I've started my work on this project sometime in early 2023 but only properly started working on it in april 2024.Most of the time was surprisingly spent on optimizing the build process - as it turns out, putting 224M+ entries into a ZIM file eats up a surprising amount of RAM just for the ZIM creator itself, which was consequently not available for the database and renderer. I learned a surprising amount on SQL and database ompimization here.

Anyway, if you are a fan of fanfiction or just a datahorder, then you can use this tool for building nice, browsable ZIM files from an existing source of fanfiction. I've personally used this tool to convert some fanfiction dumps a helpful redditor shared on r/datahoarder, but you should be able to import any files produced by fanficfare as well.

I am unfortunately not able to share the ZIM file I built, but you can use this tool to build you own.