Trying to get Wikipedia CD into Sony Reader

Tried out various options to get links to work so that I can get the Wikipedia CD onto the Reader with complete hyper-linked goodness. Links to the SW below are on the Mobileread forums.

1. flatLRF - was creating only LRF of first file to which it was pointed, no recursion, no links.

2. HTML2LRF from MobileRead forums - no links work except those within the same html file - and that too if referenced only with label.

3. Librie Toolbar from the Librie Yahoo group. Results same as above - only to be expected since HTML2LRF was made with the toolbar's dll. But it makes a Table of Contents and keeps images... very useful tutorial at http://www.xtmotion.com/librie/ - the wayback machine has a working link.

4. Installing BookCreator in a Virtual Machine as detailed in http://silicondependency.googlepages.com/bookcreator%40librie - details below.

5. BookDesigner on XP - needed Word installed (which I didn't have) for best results. But with the "reformat completely" option it was able to open html files - but no links. "Failed" when trying to export as Sony Librie (lrf). Later succeeded in exporting lrf by changing output option to not use "advanced Word doc and rtf export"! But still no links...

6. BookDesigner on Win98, which had Word2000. Yes, the links are seen as underlined text at least! But very very slow. More than 10 minutes for a single page! On a PII 400 MHz. And seeing the posts about BookDesigner problems, not encouraged to try more http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=7897

BookCreator in VMWare was, of course the most time-consuming, especially since I had to do it twice over an hour each time since the first time I "forgot" the installing Japanese part, and landed in the soup. Without Japanese, BookCreator gives error "Standard fonts not installed". And I can attest that without the "mysterious TTEdit" which also installs along with BookCreator, BookCreator refuses to start. Installing the fonts by adding support for East-Asian languages as given in the readme of the "English" BookCreator, the BookCreator crashed every time and refused to uninstall - path not found. And somehow the clock reset and Windows wanted Activation! The Windows install takes around 45 minutes. The Ethernet refused to work at first - not pinging. A series of checking and unchecking the connected checkbox on the VMWare Player Ethernet menu and changing from Bridged to Host-Only seemed to do the trick. Somewhere along the line, the BookCreator has realised that the trial period has expired, tho' the VMWare player shows Jan 2 2005!

Finally, the result is: no working links as of now, since I can't try BookCreator. Best bet seems to be HTML2LRF, with the Table of Contents it makes, make a separate book for each alphabet. Doing

dir /B

redirecting to a file, formatting it with Find/Replace so that all the filenames come on a single line with full path and separated by spaces....

Edit: March 15 2011 - changed the Librie Toolbar link to a wayback machine link.