[LINK] ebook creation software (was Re: Book monopolies)

[Kim Holburn]

Nice, thanks Craig.

epub is a nice format because it is possible to adjust it fairly easily.  I found it definitely helps to convert your book into html first and hand adjust it before converting it to epub.  Especially for things like tables of contents.  epub is a kind of special format zip file.  It is easy to unpack it and hand edit the files which are essentially xml html and css.  It is not quite so simple to rezip it but you can use a special script to get the files zipped in the right order with the right compression.

mobi on the other hand I haven't found a way to adjust or edit and is somewhat of a pain.

Converting from Word to html is, as you say, something of a disaster.  On the other hand converting from openoffice documents to html is not too bad.  OO is also much more stable for real books and much better for generating PDFs.

On 2010/Dec/03, at 8:38 AM, Craig Sanders wrote:

> On Fri, Dec 03, 2010 at 12:28:52AM +1100, Ben McGinnes wrote:
>> On 3/12/10 12:10 AM, Frank O'Connor wrote:
>>> 2. Publishing books in e-publishing formats isn't especially
>>> difficult. Nab a copy of the freebie OSS package Calibre if you
>>> want to try it. It translates books between different formats quite
>>> easily, and you can take a basic RTF, Word, PDF or other text format
>>> files and generate an ePub (iBook format), Mobi (Kindle format) or
>>> whatever at will.
>> 
>> Ooh, thanks for mentioning this little beastie, I'm definitely going
>> to have to have a play with it.
> 
> Calibre[1] is good software, but it's primary purpose is managing a
> collection of ebooks, converting them from one format to another, and
> transferring them to/from your ebook reader device(s). it can be used
> for creating new ebooks but that's a secondary purpose.
> 
> if you want to use Calibre to create new ebooks, your best bet is to
> start with HTML or XHTML and CSS files - the epub format is essentially
> a zip file containing XHTML, CSS, image files (cover, illustrations,
> etc), a table of contents and meta-data.
> 
> BTW, if your book is in MS Word format, *DO NOT* use Word's Save as HTML
> feature to create the HTML files. that produces truly abysmal HTML code
> and will result in an ugly ebook (and one that is bloated to many times
> the size due to all the unneccessary html cruft inserted by word - it
> can mean the difference between a lean 200-300K epub and a 1MB or larger
> epub).  You'd be much better off using Save as Text and then add the
> HTML markup with a general-purpose text editor like notepad (or vi :).
> or an ebook editor like Sigil below.  You could use one of the many GUI
> HTML editors too, but they generally produce HTML output almost as bad
> as Word.
> 
> Alternatively, use Save as RTF because Calibre can convert RTF files
> easily and will produce quite good results from an RTF file.  You
> get best results, however, with hand-crafted HTML & CSS than with
> auto-generated or converted html.
> 
> as well as a GUI interface, calibre has a suite of command-line tools
> so the production chain of converting a book from HTML (or RTF, Word or
> OpenOffice, etc) can be completely automated.
> 
> Speaking of OpenOffice, there is an OO plugin called Writer2Epub[2]
> for converting documents to epub books - a relatively straightforward
> conversion because OO's native format is also a zip file container for
> XHTML & CSS. the generated epub is of reasonable quality (fine for
> quickly converting a document for reading on your ebook reader) but will
> require some editing to get it to publication quality.
> 
> 
> 
> BTW, there's another open source program called Sigil[3] which is
> an epub editor, designed for creating epub books from scratch. it
> lets you switch between a WYSIWIG view for editing the content like a
> word-processor and a code view for editing the underlying HTML, there's
> even a split mode for viewing both in the same window.
> 
> it's also good for doing final edits to epub books created (or
> converted) by calibre or OO.
> 
> 
> [1] http://calibre-ebook.com/
> [2] http://luke.simplicissimus.it/writer2epub/#english
> [3] http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
> 
> both calibre and sigil are cross-platform and run on pretty much any OS,
> including Linux, Mac, & MS Windows. writer2epub runs on OO so is also
> cross-platform.
> 
> craig
> 
> -- 
> craig sanders <cas at taz.net.au>
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Kim Holburn
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