![]() Over the last few months I’ve discussed preparing your manuscript and your images for conversion into ebook form.If you’re like us and love to read, then click here to score tons of free and discounted ebooks. Using a conversion app or online service.Saving from a word-processing or page-layout application into ePub format.Just to review, I suggested that there were four basic ways to convert your manuscript into ebook format: This month, I’m going to look more closely at a subject that I’ve touched on: choosing an ebook conversion tool. We’re going to ignore option #1 - if you’re the kind of person who wants to dig that deep into the guts of ebook creation, I don’t think that you’re going to be patient with this process. I’m not going to dwell on option #4 (or the second half of option #3), since the emphasis of this series is how to create your own ebooks. Using a conversion service or ebook designer is always an option, and I’ll discuss later how to choose one. But for now, we’re going to look at choosing the software that you can use to create a book yourself. Here’s the list of software that I will look through with you. IBooks Author (fixed-format ebook design app).QuarkXpress (professional page-layout app).Adobe’s InDesign (professional page-layout app).Apple’s Pages for OS X or iOS (consumer word-processing/page-layout app).Apache’s OpenOffice has a plug-in called Writer2ePub that allows you to save files as ebooks (open source office suite). Calibre (ebook library app with file-editing utility).Here’s the chapter head that we’re going to be looking at a lot: I’ll also talk briefly about the possibility of using one of these tools to create the ePub ebook file, and then a text editor or web-design app to do any post-conversion editing.įor each app, I’m going to start with a formatted Word document from a book that I’m working on (my own novel Risuko, actually). I chose this file because it had just enough complexity to test these conversion tools, but not so much that it will break all of them. The fonts are part of what makes this file challenging the drop cap at the beginning of the first paragraph is another part. The manuscript has been prepared in the manner that I suggested in an earlier post all of the styles are applied globally, and had names applied in Word’s Styles palette. The style for the chapter header above is called “Chapter-Head” the first paragraph with the drop cap is called “Body-First.” Italics and boldface are applied simply with Word’s keyboard formatting ( command-I and command-B on my Mac). The “Body-First” style has a built-in drop-cap rule - I didn’t have to style those letters separately, but simply added the “Body-First” style to the first body paragraph in each chapter. The first three apps all fall into the category of word-processing/writing tools. OpenOffice opens and edits just about every kind of every-day file that you can think of, and it can save into a number of file formats, including Word docs (.doc and. Versions will run on just about every kind of computer you can think of. Writer2ePub is a plugin that allows you to save your word-processing file into ePub format. Once the plugin is installed, you’ll get a floating palette that allows you access to the ePub tools: You add the plugin in OpenOffice by using the Extension Manager from the Tools menu. This file was imported from a PDF rather than a Word doc. ![]() That green E is the ePub logo, by the way. ![]() You have to save your file in OpenOffice’s native ODT format. Once you’ve done that, you can click on those buttons. The right-hand button opens the preference panel. The center button allows you to edit the ebook metadata, adding the title, author, cover image, etc. The most important button for our purposes is the one on the left. You can export quickly, but unless you add “w2e_” to the beginning of every one of your text style names, they won’t export. This will leave all of your text unformatted. (We’ll see why that’s a problem soon enough.) If you do add the tag at the beginning of the style names, however, the ePub file that Word2ePub exports will do an okay job of converting the styles you specified:Īnd the HTML won’t have a lot of extra coding added. ![]() It gives an author a single place to gather research, images, notes, outtakes - all in one file. It imports a wide variety of files - including the standard DOC, DOCX, and RTF word processing files. ![]()
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