Book Creation Tutorials [Archive]

RWood

04-13-2007, 09:49 PM

I played with BD last night and per comments I saved to the BD. This morning I tried opening the file and all I get is a repeating dialog box asking me to "Open" or "Save". This dialog box keeps repeating with new versions of a blank document being opened. I went straignt to V5 without the recommended V4 with updates. What am I doing wrong.You need to install the original BD4 through their standard install. This registers all the components correctly. Then take the last update, unzip that and then copy all of the files (overwriting all the way) to the BookDesigner directory in Program Files. It should work fine then.

Is there any button or quick way to center text. Often there is material which at first are marked as titles (centered) and when converting them to paragraphs they become left justified, you then have to go to the 'format menu/more transformations/align-center'. Gets tiresome after a while. It would be nice if there was a button to center text. (maybe there is but I can't fine one )Not that I have found. Someone once suggested that the SubTitle button could be used for that purpose although that could create a great deal of confusion depending upon what other formatting conventions you may use. As a rule I try to format the text in Word prior to importing it to BookDesigner as I like the editor in Word better. (I am also more experienced with it.)

BeB

04-14-2007, 12:00 AM

Is there any button or quick way to center text. Often there is material which at first are marked as titles (centered) and when converting them to paragraphs they become left justified, you then have to go to the 'format menu/more transformations/align-center'. Gets tiresome after a while. It would be nice if there was a button to center text. (maybe there is but I can't fine one :happy2: )

Thanks

RWood is right, no quick way to center align, however you could try changing the settings for one of the styles like epigraph, text author or cite (I use verse and annotation), only drawback is the look in BD won't be the same as the LRF.

jgs

04-14-2007, 01:28 PM

[QUOTE=RWood]You need to install the original BD4 through their standard install. This registers all the components correctly. Then take the last update, unzip that and then copy all of the files (overwriting all the way) to the BookDesigner directory in Program Files. It should work fine then.

OK, I installed V4 and then copies all the v5 files to the v5 directory. I still cannot open a previously created BD file that I have stored on my desktop. I still get a dialog box that asks whether I want to "Open" or "Save" the file that I requested to open. "Open" just repeats the same step all over again. I have not tried "Save". In the settings area, can I change the different output locations?

Another question: I clicked on the "R" and went to Reader mode. All menus went away. How do I get back to Editor mode?

Jim

RWood

04-14-2007, 03:46 PM

First, the version 5 files are copied on top of the version 4 files so that you only have one directory when finished.

The only output locations I know how to change are the ones for where the Sony LRF files will be stored (under the save file as area in the Make eBooks|Sony Reader box) and the File|Save File As to save a source copy.

What is interesting is that there is not an option to save the file as a BookDesigner file. BookDesigner uses an extension of HTML0 (that's a zero at the end) and can be seen in the TMP area in the BookDesigner directory of Program Files. The HTM or HTML save options produce a file of exactly the same length and content (as reported by Ultra Compare.)

To get back to the editor mode click Configuration from the top menu bar and then select Editor/Reader Mode. This will return you to editor mode. (I got there once and do not plan on returning to reader mode again. :D)

NatCh

04-14-2007, 03:54 PM

What is interesting is that there is not an option to save the file as a BookDesigner file.There is, but it's disguised as one of the "Make" options -- if you look at the little help labels that pop up when you hover over the "make" buttons, one of them is make a BookDesigner book. :nice:

RWood

04-14-2007, 04:06 PM

There is, but it's disguised as one of the "Make" options -- if you look at the little help labels that pop up when you hover over the "make" buttons, one of them is make a BookDesigner book. :nice:You sneeky dog you, :D I see it now. Thanks.

NatCh

04-14-2007, 04:08 PM

Heh, I didn't hide it there! :grin:

jgs

04-14-2007, 05:16 PM

SciFiReader

04-14-2007, 08:50 PM

RWood

04-14-2007, 09:08 PM

In the Settings/Output File Settings/Set Path, I have been successful in putting selected files in a directory of my choice. I just don't seem to be able to load a BD file that I saved to my desktop yesterday "before" I did a proper installation.

I am a bit nervous to go back to Reader mode. Where is the Top Menu Bar? It seemed like I had nothing.The "Top Menu Bar" is the series of high level menu names that each produce a drop down menu. From left it reads File, Edit, Format, ..., Configuration, and Help. If you can't see it, try pressing and releasing the ALT key, pressing the left arrow key three times, and pressing enter. This should show the Configuration drop down menu.

RWood

04-14-2007, 09:15 PM

Harry I really love your tutorial and was working my way through it until I came upon your statement of clicking on the Sony Reader button to make the book. Neither the version 4.0 or 5.0 that I downloaded has a Sony Reader function on it. Am I missing something somewhere? Do I have to load an update that I missed? Thanks fo rsetting me straight.Here is the link (http://www.the-ebook.org/e107/e107_files/downloads/bd/BookDesignerExe.zip) to the latest update (~6 Meg) that I know about. It is a self-extracting zip file and the file EXE date is 12 April 2007.

SciFiReader

04-15-2007, 10:16 AM

Thanks for the help.

sartori

04-17-2007, 03:52 AM

I know most people are using BookDesigner for creating their lrfs. But for those who delve more into the lrs file by hand I have attached a sample file that shows how to use graphics as dropcaps.

Someone asked on a thread a while ago on how to do this and I finally got round to working something up. (Unfortunately I can't find the original thread so I figure this is a good place for it).

I've tried to keep the lrs file tidy with indenting - if anyone knows the format for adding comments to an lrs file, please let me know.

The file contains the lrs file, the images used and the final lrf file. The lrs file should compile fine using lrs2lrf.

Sartori

igorsk

04-17-2007, 07:52 AM

AFAIK you can use standard XML comments:

Azayzel

04-17-2007, 09:31 AM

Igorsk, I think I read previously that you speak (or can read) some Russian. If that's the case, have you read anywhere on the home forum of Book Designer that mentions why you cannot later change the meta-tags of an LRF created in BD? The reason I ask is that I converted a LIT to LRF using BD and the Reader isn't picking up the meta info (nor using the Connect software), so I'm not sure if it's been damaged or what.

Thanks!

SciFiReader

04-18-2007, 10:45 AM

Great job on this. I used it over the qeekend to make three books for my reader, and they came out great. I have one suggestion, you might want to add page #'s to each page. When my cat knocked the document on the floor, I found out those would have make the re-assembly a little easier. A "10" for all your work on this.

Yaksha

04-21-2007, 04:08 PM

I gave this a shot, thanks for all your time and effort!

I think I may have missed a setting somewhere, but I noticed that my chapter links don't work exactly how they should. In Book Designer, "I. Philip Hadden and King Cetywayo" is clickable. But after converting it to an LRF, only the "I." part is a link. Both in CONNECT and on the Sony Reader.

Any ideas?

JSWolf

04-21-2007, 04:27 PM

Yaksha

04-22-2007, 12:12 AM

JSWolf

04-22-2007, 12:22 AM

deleted for being incorrect.

HarryT

04-22-2007, 04:08 AM

Is there a way to indent a block of text? i.e. if I wanted it to look like this.

This is a block of text, I'm just typing this as
an example and putting in hard returns, I know
the Reader takes care of that for me, but just
bare with me while I explain what I mean.

This is another block of text, but now the
left margin does not line up with the margin
above. I want to get a block of text to do
this for one of the stories I am working on.

And then, later, the margin would return to normal.

Yes, you can use one of the "styles" in BD for this. Eg, if you highlight a block of text, and mark it as "verse" in BD, you'll see that it indents. If there's one of the styles that you don't routinely use, you could give it the same font, etc, as the "paragraph" style, but indent it. The amount of indentation is the column labelled "Shift" on the "Styles" tab of the "Make Sony Reader File" dialog. Note that it's not the "Indent" column - that determines the indentation of the first line!

Yaksha

04-22-2007, 11:40 PM

So I spent about 2 hours formatting a book, and still had a bit of work today. I decided to take a break. I hit File -> Save to save all of my changes. Where ever it saved was the default location.

I came back later and started working on another book.

Then I decided to go back to my original book.

I went to File -> Recent Books and clicked on the book I was working on.

All of my formatting is gone. It appears to have reloaded the book from the original source. Is there any way to get back my original formatting?

Yaksha

04-23-2007, 02:09 AM

OK, I opened another book, make some formatting changes to it, then went to File -> Save As and saved it somewhere else. The default was an HTML format.

I worked on another book.

Then I went back to my original book. While some of the formatting appears to have stayed, I lost a lot of the BookDesigner features.

All of my page breaks are gone.
Some of the text that was originally a titled and I formatted as a paragraph is back to a title.

How am I supposed to save my work and come back to it later?

ultim8fury

04-23-2007, 03:44 AM

you need to create a BookDesigner book. There is an icon of the corrector window. Down at the bottom right this will save all your formatting.

HarryT

04-23-2007, 03:50 AM

Another way to do it, which I prefer personally, is to copy the "LastFile" folder from the BD folder into your own filestore for that book. To resume work on the book, go into the "LastFile" folder in your own filestore, and double click the "book_name.html0" file.

Aybara

04-29-2007, 06:17 PM

OK, I click on the make book for Sony Reader and the program does nada.

Did I miss something?

HarryT

04-30-2007, 03:15 AM

I don't know what "nada" means, but I presume you mean that the program isn't working correctly :grin:.

I suspect that you haven't installed it correctly. You need to first of all run the "Book Designer 4" installer (it's a proper ".msi" installer) then, once BD4 is installed, get the current BD5 upgrade and unzip that on top of the BD4 installation folder, overwriting all the files with the same names. Everything should then be OK.

RWood

04-30-2007, 07:14 AM

nada = zilch = nothing = bubkiss = zip :D

HarryT

04-30-2007, 07:44 AM

Thanks :grin:. What's that? Spanish?

RWood

04-30-2007, 10:26 AM

Not sure, I always thought of it as slang. :D

JSWolf

05-02-2007, 02:42 AM

OK, I click on the make book for Sony Reader and the program does nada.

Did I miss something?
Did you download the BD 4 install file and install with that and then download the update and copy the files over the installed files?

Jon

Yaksha

05-07-2007, 01:22 AM

How come when I import this PDF into BD all of the quote tags are stripped out? Or is it just some weird setting I made?

Yaksha

05-08-2007, 03:03 AM

How come when I import this PDF into BD all of the quote tags are stripped out? Or is it just some weird setting I made?

Is anyone at least experiencing the same thing as me, or do the quotes show up when you put it into BD?

JSWolf

05-08-2007, 05:39 PM

There are better solutions to convert PDF to some other format than BD.

Roy White

05-21-2007, 12:50 AM

I've got a question. The last book I did was Treasure Island by Stevenson. I calle dit 'version2
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=70459#post70459 I cruised the net and got all the N.C, Wyeth illustrations of this book I could find.. (I have the N.C. Wyeth Illustrated version and its a treasure indeed!) I was wondering if there is a way to create a "Illustration: Section with links like the Chapter section without having to use the 'title' button and changing the headings at the bottom of the rest of that chapter into the name of the illustration.. (If you follow me..)

HarryT

05-21-2007, 03:45 AM

I was wondering if there is a way to create a "Illustration: Section with links like the Chapter section without having to use the 'title' button and changing the headings at the bottom of the rest of that chapter into the name of the illustration.. (If you follow me..)

You mean to have an "index of illustrations" page at the start of the book, to allow people to jump straight to them?

Certainly. Just add some text underneath each illustration (either the name of it, or just "Illustration 1", etc). Then, highlight the text, and add it as a "note" in the "Notes and Links" dialog. Finally, create your list of illustrations, select the text that you want to "jump" to the illustration and add it as a "link" to the "note" you previously added.

If you look at my BD tutorial, I describe the process in detail for creating a table of contents. What you're linking to doesn't have to be a "Title" - that has nothing at all to do with it.

HarryT

05-21-2007, 04:06 AM

I'd appreciate a bit of advice from fellow "book creators".

I'm currently doing a version of "Robinson Crusoe". The problem is, it's a very long book, and it doesn't have chapters - it's just one long stream of text!

Question is, should I leave it like that, or attempt to split it up in some way? It doesn't seem very nice not to give the user some way of knowing where they are in it.

It does have the page numbers of the original book it in. How about if I added a "chapter heading", say, every 50 pages through the book, and just call them "Page 50", "Page 100", etc?

What do you think?

RWood

05-21-2007, 05:41 AM

Hpw about "Original Page 50"?

EatingPie

05-26-2007, 03:53 PM

HarryT suggested I post a little info about my new utility pielrf for converting e-books in text form to LRF format. I designed pielrf with Guteberg and OCR books in mind.

Pielrf duplicates the look of Sony Connect EBooks, while incorporating ease of use, and full control over options. It includes much-requested features easy table of contents, chapterization, top-of-page headers, and curly quotes.

Most books only take a few minutes of preparation.

You can download pielrf from the follwing thread.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10752

Here's a few basics

RUNNING THE PROGRAM

pielrf -i infile.txt -o outfile.lrf -t "Book Title" -a "Author Name"

This will generate a basic LRF file, with a single "Table of Contents" entry, flowed paragraphs, curly-quotes and page headers.

EDITING THE INPUT FILE

If you want a Table of Contents and Chapters, it takes just ONE WORD(!!) in your book's text file!

<chapter>

If your book is like this...

Chapter One
...Some Text
...
Chapter Two
...Some More Text

Just do this...

<chapter>Chapter One
...Some Text
...
<chapter>Chapter Two
...Some More Text

Both chapters are added to the Reader's Table of Contents, as well as a "Table of Contents" page. "Chapter One" and "Chapter Two" are also made headers for their respective chapters.

That's the only editing needed, and the rest is done automatically.

One Addition tag allows you to add text and vertical spacing on the TOC page.

<toctext>

Putting it on a line by itself adds a blank line to the TOC. Following it with text, similar to "<chapter>," adds that text to the TOC page.

HTML FOR TYPOGRAPHY

Unlike BookDesigner, you need to edit the input text file separately and add typographic HTML tags by hand before running pielrf. While, for example, BookDesigner lets you highlight text and select "Italics," here, you would add the HTML tags "<i>" and "</i>" yourself.

The file does not have to be actual HTML (although it can be), you can add these tags to any plain text file.

Recognized Tags

<CENTER></CENTER> - Centered Text
<I></I> - Italics
<B></B> - Bold
<SUB></SUB> - Subscript
<SUP></SUP> - Superscript
<BR> - Line Break (Vertical Whitespace)
<P> - Paragraph (Use With "-b html" Command Line Switch)
<H1></H1>
<H2></H2>
<H3></H3> - Heading (Bold+Large Font) Tags (all resolve to same font size)

You can combine tags like "<center>" and "<h1>" for example, with the only limit being bold and italics -- its one or the other, so you won't get bold-italic text.

FEATURES

+ Table of Contents Menu and Page via the <chapter> tag.
+ Top-of-Page headers
+ Curly (typographic) quotes.
+ Paragraph auto-flow.
+ Can make whole book Bold to increase contrast.
+ Understands HTML tags <i></i>, <b></b>, <center></center>, <sub></sub>, <sup></sup>, <p></p>, <h1></h1>-<h3></h3>.
+ Understands ALL HTML Ampersand tags - &, &pound, &uumlat, etc.
+ Paragraphs can be delimited by tabs, spaces, vertical whitespace.
+ Font size / weight (bold) can be controlled from command line.
+ Ability to control almost everything else from the command line too!

OPTION OVERLOAD

You can control just about every option regarding layout. The defaults should work just fine, and all you need to provide are the input and output files, and a title and author. But to see the options just type:

pielrf -h

I provide a couple of examples in the next post.

-Pie

EatingPie

05-26-2007, 03:56 PM

Here's two examples from Gutenberg: War of the Worlds and Utopia. Utopia took me about 5 minutes to prepare, moving the license and adding "<chapter>" tags. War of the Worlds was only slightly longer, but I also used the "<toctext>" tag.

pielrf -i utopia.txt -o utopia.lrf -t Utopia -a "Thomas More"

pielrf -i waroftheworlds.htm -o waroftheworlds.lrf -t "War of the Worlds" -a "H.G. Wells" -b html --headerstyle=titlechapter

I've included both the original (edited) file, and the final LRF.

-Pie

tsgreer

05-26-2007, 03:59 PM

Can this be used to place images in the .lrf file as well?

kovidgoyal

05-26-2007, 04:45 PM

No for that you have to use html2lrf which supports a much larger subset of HTML including images and tables and links...

EatingPie

05-26-2007, 09:35 PM

Can this be used to place images in the .lrf file as well?

Images are sort of a thorn in my side. I had added some code for them, but ejected it because it just didn't work very well. :(

I notice that HarryT likes to put images on the book title page. Is this the typical use? Or did you want to put images interpersed throughout the book -- with, say, text flowing around (above/below) the image? Say, like an illustrated chapter book.

-Pie

RWood

05-26-2007, 09:46 PM

EatingPie

05-27-2007, 03:04 AM

While graphics make for a better cover, many of the books I have worked on are all text and graphics are of no importance.

That said, many of the current books I am working on for the near future are graphic intensive. Some have just ornate drop caps at the start of chapters while others are a tight combination of text and graphics. One, A Child's Garden of Verses, has many graphics that need to fit together tightly to produce the finished pages. (Even html2lrf is having trouble with this at the moment even when autorotate is turned off.) Others like the Beatrix Potter series are simply alternating text and graphics without any side-by-side of text and graphics.

So yes, the integration of graphics is a big deal for any tool that is used to produce LRF books.

Indeed! I tried to incorporate images because I wanted to read books to my children from the Reader. Children like pictures, which I guess is why Childrens' books have so many pictures! :)

The reason I asked about flow was because my abortive attempt only produced images at the end of the chapter (or page) -- not very flow-friendly. That didn't seem worthwhile, so I punted. I'd love to give it another shot, but I'd like to see what users are looking for so I can take that into account ahead of time.

That said, my main focus has been ease of use in producing "text" books, so images may be at cross purposes for pielrf.

-Pie

HarryT

05-27-2007, 03:35 AM

Being able to incorporate images into the book is very important for some types of book - eg, if you look at the "Philo Vance" detective stories I've posted recently, you'll see that they have all sorts of diagrams in them such as plans of the building where the crime took place, and the books would lose a lot without them.

I don't personally see the need to "flow" text around images as being important - simply being able to put images on the page "between" two paragraphs would suit me fine. BD does support text flow - you can put an image on the left side of the page and have the text carry on to the right of it - but in cases where I've found that in the books I've converted, I've "unflowed" it - ie cut the picture from the text and re-inserted it at the end of the paragraph. On the Reader's small screen, I don't think that "flowed" text look especially good.

Just being able to have:

<paragraph of text>
<picture>
<Another paragraph of text>

is, however, I think pretty vital!

In reality, because of the size of the Reader's screen, large-ish images do generally end up either at the start of a page, or at the end, or, indeed, occupying a page by themselves, but I certainly think there should be the option of having images in the middle of the page. When I did the "Sherlock Holmes" stories, for example, it was vital that the "Dancing Men" graphics be able to be inserted mid-text.

Roy White

05-27-2007, 12:59 PM

i'm trying to find a way to define and edit images to the right size for the page also.. hhmmm...

HarryT

05-27-2007, 01:10 PM

With BD, once you've dragged the image onto the page, just double click it. A dialog pops up on which you can set the size of the image.

Roy White

05-28-2007, 01:42 PM

Ok. Harry, Here's a trick I accidentally found out the other day after I used the technique you defined in your tutorial to change the Chapter headings from Chapter 1 chapter 2 etc, To the real chapter headings... You should change your tutorial to this way since it saves hours... What I do is load the text, clean the top and bottom of the Gutenberg legalese junk, add the name of the book and author, the contents, then use the element browser under tools to find the "Titles. usually they will be Chapter one chapter two etc. Wiht the real chapter titles assigned as subtitles under each one) Sometimes a chapter or two will not be assigned as a title.. so i click on the chapter that is before the missing ones and scroll to find the chapter that isnt assigned as a title.. Then highlight it and make it a title using the corrector panel, it will appear in the element browser. After I make sure all the chapters are there, I go though the chapter list one by one, (By simply clicking on the 'chapter one' list in element browser (The text will jump to that point int he book an I can check to make sure the real chapter title appears below each 'chapter' title. Sometimes the real chapter title is there but not assigned a sa subtitle so i highlight TAHT and use the corrector panel to change that to a subtitle. This way im sure the real chapter titles wil be there when i use element browser to find the subtitles, the REAL chapter titles, the text just below the chapter title 'chapter 5' etc are assigned as subtitles. So.. I click through the subtitles and make sure that every one has the words chapter 8' or whatever above them., Sometimes element browser will assign other text as subtitles so I just use the 'verse' tool and highlight any text that is assigned as a subtitle that you dont want to eventually be the real chapter titles as a verse. (It will deselect those words as subtitles and make them a verse, or whatever you want to do to deselect that text as a subtitle. Once you have all the real chapter titles assigned as subtitles you can (If the text doesnt already have the chapter titles listed in a table of contents.. Open a notepad file and type in all the chapter titles by having element browser find the subtitles. (Remember by now they are the real chapter titles.. Then copy and paste the notepad list to the 'contents page at the top of your book... You can use element browser to find the titles and they will be 'Chapter one' chapter 2 etc. Now highlight the top one on the list in element browser hit shift, select the bottom one. it will highlight the entire list, then use the pull down list at the bottom of the element browser tool where it says, reformat selected elements as.. and you go to delete.. hit button,, all those 'chapter 7 etc titles are gone! Then use the element browser to find subtitles (Your real chapter titles Highlight all, then use the reformatting tool at the bottom of the element browser window to change all THOSE to Titles. Walla! You have as your chapter titles all the real titles and have rid yourself of the "Chapter 4" text in about 2 minutes flat instead of scrolling through the text and doing it lal manually. I saved an hour doing this on Les Miserables after the program crashed the other day and i lost an hour of tediously doing this manually without saving my work.

You can then use element browser to find all empty paragraphs, it wont find real paragraph breaks just empty ones where someone hit return twice or sometimes html text or txt files are formatted with more than one line break between paragraphs. ... Find empty paragraphs, select all by clicking top one and bottom one with shift held down... use pull down reformatting tool to delete all those and all the text in the book will be nice and tight and tidy.. Sweet trick

I hope that was as clear as mud.

RWood

05-28-2007, 05:20 PM

clean the top and bottom of the Gutenberg legalese junk

What I do is to put it in its own section at the back of the book with the chapter heading "Project Gutenberg Data" or "Project Gutenberg Information"

Since I took the raw text from their site it is only fair that they get the credit they earned. It is also part of the terms of the agreement we agreed to when we downloaded from their site. I am sure that this is what you mean that you do because I know that you are not the sort of person to cut out their credit altogether.

Roy White

05-28-2007, 09:09 PM

Oops. I never read it. I guess thats what it says Huh? From now on I'll include it.

DDDOOOHHH!!

HarryT

05-29-2007, 03:53 AM

What I do is to put it in its own section at the back of the book with the chapter heading "Project Gutenberg Data" or "Project Gutenberg Information"

Since I took the raw text from their site it is only fair that they get the credit they earned. It is also part of the terms of the agreement we agreed to when we downloaded from their site. I am sure that this is what you mean that you do because I know that you are not the sort of person to cut out their credit altogether.

The "deal" with PG is that you either:

1. Remove all mention of PG from the book.

or:

2. Include the full licence agreement.

I personally choose option 1. I freely acknowledge that PG are a wonderful resource (and I do a fair amount of proofreading for them myself), but I just don't like the 20 pages of legal "stuff" in the books that I create.

HarryT

05-29-2007, 04:00 AM

NatCh

05-29-2007, 11:45 AM

Personally, I tend to want to leave the chapter headings/names/whatever the way the author wrote them ... or at least the way they made it through the publisher, whichever. :wink:

Even though I don't personally have much interest in a TOC that lists the chapters, I figure that it's only respectful to not change such things without a strong reason. :shrug:

HarryT

05-29-2007, 01:04 PM

I generally go for an intermediate solution and change the chapter headings from:

Chapter 1
Harry Writes a Book

to:

1. Harry Writes a Book

for the purely practical reason that the Reader's "TOC" page only displays a very limited length of text, and it seems a little pointless to "waste" that space by having the word "Chapter" there. I do want to see the chapter numbers, though - personally I consider those to be essential!

pitolee

05-30-2007, 12:29 AM

I've found that I automatically migrated to Harry's solution - to give the most meaningful chapter divisions without taking up so much screen real estate...

JSWolf

05-30-2007, 11:47 PM

The "deal" with PG is that you either:

1. Remove all mention of PG from the book.

or:

2. Include the full licence agreement.

I personally choose option 1. I freely acknowledge that PG are a wonderful resource (and I do a fair amount of proofreading for them myself), but I just don't like the 20 pages of legal "stuff" in the books that I create.
I do leave the full license. But I make it easy enough to just go to the ToC and go right past it all.

JSWolf

05-30-2007, 11:49 PM

I'm afraid that I don't like that at all :).

What you're saying, if I understand you correctly, is that you prefer to remove "Chapter 1" and replace it with "Harry Writes a Book" (or whatever the "real" chapter title, as you put it, is).

That might work for "pulp" fiction that nobody really cares about, but I certainly wouldn't do it for a "classic". Suppose I read a book in which I see "In chapter 53 of Les Miserables, Hugo says....". How do I find out what chapter 53 is in your version of the book which lacks chapter numbers?

We obviously all prepare books the way that we think best, but personally I feel that preserving chapter and book number for "serious" literature is absolutely essential.

What do other people think?
One option is—using the chapter 1 example—[b]1. Harry Writes a Book[b] so that way you get the title and the chapter number to know what chapter itreally is supposed to be.

RWood

06-11-2007, 12:40 AM

We have achieved a great deal of uniformity in the naming of posts containing LRF books and ZIP/RAR files containing LRF books. I feel we need more uniformity in the naming of the books themselves.

This is not directed at any one person, I have been as guilty as anyone. Once we download the file (and perhaps extract it from the compressed carrier) we have no reference to the original post title.

One recent book file was entitled "Collected Works.lrf" OK, who wrote it? Another started with "Sony Reader" before getting to what the content of the file was. My problem has always been that I title the file the same as the book title (the BookDesigner default) and the only way you know who wrote it is either if you open the file or you have a great knowledge of works published in the English language. The Harvard Classics are identified only by the HC name and the volume number. (Then again this is the way they would be if they were on the shelf and is in keeping with series omnibus offerings at MobileRead; but, still not that descriptive.

Therefore I am suggesting that we start naming individual book files like we name the posts -- author (L, F M) followed by a dash and then the book title. If it is a version other than 1 this should be appended or any other descriptive information that is needed such as "text only" or "illustrated."

Omnibus or collections should also follow a like course. I am open to suggestions on how to better name (if possible) the Harvard Classics series. I do plan on publishing an index at the end of the series, should this be published sooner?

HarryT

06-11-2007, 03:49 AM

Therefore I am suggesting that we start naming individual book files like we name the posts -- author (L, F M) followed by a dash and then the book title. If it is a version other than 1 this should be appended or any other descriptive information that is needed such as "text only" or "illustrated."

The way that I arrange my books on my hard disk makes this unnecessary. I use a hierarchical file structure, first of author names, then within that of book titles. Makes it easy to find books, even with 10,000+ PG books on the disk.

Eg, I store my books as:

Piper, H. Beam <--- folder
Paratime Omnibus <--- folder
All the files associated with the book
Terro-Human Future History <--- folder
All the files associated with the book

etc.

This works well because I'll often have a book in a number of different formats (eg, a PG original and a "Reader" version) plus, for books I've created myself, all the BD working files for it.

RWood

06-11-2007, 09:21 AM

I am not talking about how we arrange files on our own disks as I use a an arrangement like yours Harry, I am talking about files we post for others that may grab a few at a time and then have to wonder what files they did download. Many will take them when they find them rather than note them and download them only when they are ready to read them. It is foir these people that I am suggesting this.

HarryT

06-11-2007, 09:29 AM

JSWolf

06-11-2007, 02:23 PM

I take your point - a title like "Collected Stories" isn't too helpful if you come across it 6 months later. This isn't something I'd like to impose on uploaders, but it's certainly a good idea to request that people use meaningful file names in cases where there may be ambiguity.
I was the one who uploaded Collected Stories (http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11361). I've removed the other two versions and renamed it to be something you'll understand long after you've downloaded it. I've even put the version number in the filename since it is not 1.0. Version 1.0 doesn't need to be added to the filename (IMO). Let me know if the new name is ok. If it is, then I think we should standardize that way.

Jon

HarryT

06-11-2007, 02:31 PM

Thanks Jon - I appreciate you taking the trouble to do that. Very good of you.

JSWolf

06-11-2007, 02:37 PM

Thanks Jon - I appreciate you taking the trouble to do that. Very good of you.
I honestly didn't know the way I had the filename might someday be an issue. But changing it was a simple matter. I even renamed the source file as well so if I do find more typos to fix and upload newer versions, I won't forget.

Jon

HarryT

06-11-2007, 02:41 PM

In all honesty it hadn't occured to me either, but the point that Wood makes is, I think, a very valid one.

JSWolf

06-11-2007, 02:51 PM

If anyone of of us is not guilty of bad filename(s), let him or her please keep on top of Sony to fix the POS Connect web site while the rest of us fix our filename(s).

JSWolf

06-11-2007, 03:22 PM

This may be a silly question...

Why is it we (I've done it too) post a new version of a book we've converted for one reason or another and leave the original still there when the new one is to add something or fix something and thus the original no longer needs to be there?

HarryT

06-12-2007, 03:26 AM

The main reason for leaving the old version is that it "preserves" the total download counts. Unloading a new version doesn't affect the download count of the old one. I find it interesting to see what type of books appeal most to people.

By all means delete the old one if you wish - it's entirely up to you.

Alexander Turcic

06-24-2007, 09:33 AM

As long as we have space (and we still do), feel free to upload your revisions while keeping the old one intact.

JSWolf

06-24-2007, 10:59 AM

Alexander Turcic

06-25-2007, 07:00 AM

I like the idea that someone came up with (was it RWood or NatCh) of putting in the download count in the revised message with the new version. Thus the old edition can be deleted without losing the count.

That would require some code modification, something we can think about. It would have to be an option someone could activate, like "keep download count with new attachment). But it's kinda tricky. Especially when a post has more than one attachment, and you are going to replace more than one of these attachments (which may have different filenames).

HarryT

06-25-2007, 07:11 AM

JSWolf

06-25-2007, 08:41 AM

Hi Alex,

You misunderstand what Jon's saying. All he means is that a couple of uploaders, when they replace a file, have simply said in the edited text something like "Previous downloads: 123" (or whatever). A purely manual process; nothing automated.
Exactly. I did the same thing. Manually posted the previous download count so I could then delete the old version without losing the count.

astra

06-26-2007, 09:51 AM

Hi,

I am trying to edit a book according to the famous instruction set.
I try to insert page breaks, I can see them but when I save the file and create LRF, the page breaks I insert are ignored :(

At the very beginning of the file I am typing book author and book title, and I type the word "by" between them, I mark them book author, book title and "by" is just a paragraph in the centre...it looks perfect in BD, I save everything then create LRF...and everything is in a mess. For some reason "by" is inserted after book author...although in BD it looks fine.

Any pice of advice please?

JSWolf

06-26-2007, 10:01 AM

astra

06-26-2007, 10:04 AM

astra

06-26-2007, 10:41 AM

At the very beginning of the file I am typing book author and book title, and I type the word "by" between them, I mark them book author, book title and "by" is just a paragraph in the centre...it looks perfect in BD, I save everything then create LRF...and everything is in a mess. For some reason "by" is inserted after book author...although in BD it looks fine.

What about this part of question? :)

HarryT

06-26-2007, 11:08 AM

Check the "Skip Title Page" box on the "Options" screen. That way BD will use your title page rather than generating one itself, which is, I suspect, what it's doing at the moment.

astra

06-26-2007, 11:15 AM

Check the "Skip Title Page" box on the "Options" screen. That way BD will use your title page rather than generating one itself, which is, I suspect, what it's doing at the moment.

Oh, I see. Thanks a lot.
Checking this box will prevent BD from auto-generating TOC though, won't it?

HarryT

06-26-2007, 11:22 AM

Oh, I see. Thanks a lot.
Checking this box will prevent BD from auto-generating TOC though, won't it?

No, it has nothing at all to do with the TOC. The TOC will be generated (by default, anyway) from items having the "Title" style.

astra

06-26-2007, 11:23 AM

No, it has nothing at all to do with the TOC. The TOC will be generated (by default, anyway) from items having the "Title" style.

Yes! Skip Front Page!
Thanks a lot!

HarryT

06-26-2007, 01:44 PM

You're very welcome. Glad it worked!

Roy White

06-27-2007, 10:11 PM

I'vr found that sometimes when I load a text file, BD sometimes assigns a blank space (Paragraph maybe) as a book title or author. I always click tools < element browser< The look through all the elements to make sure it doesnt have a blank space assigned as author or title. Frequently any text that is bold or capitalized will be assigned a sa 'title' and i select those and change to paragraph. (Most of you know all this of course) Its an easy way to clean up..

JSWolf

06-28-2007, 10:25 AM

I had a situation where I cut the author name and book title and it took the book title properly, but I must have left something behind where the author kept coming up blank.

The way I fixed it was to delete that page and recreate it. All it was was the cover image and author name and book title. So that wasn't too much of a hassle.

David P

06-29-2007, 11:43 AM

I'm still struggling . . .

Not only with BD, but also with where to post stuff. Anyway, I'll try this.

I have downloaded text from Gutenberg Australia, saved the source and tried to load it into BD. No paragraphs at all - I get a single stream of words (checked this by resizing the window). I wrote a program to strip off the line end CR's so I would end up with genuine paragraphs, imported that and got the same result.

So I imported the CR adjusted file intoWord, formatted the font, changed the paragaph spacing (looks good now) and saved this as an RTF and DOC. Then tried to import either into BD - now I get an unhandled exception error, access violation, location 0000 and BD terminates abnormally (we used to say crashed).

The RTF file works okay on the PRS500 though. All I need is the TOC stuff, as it seems that SOny ignores the cross references in the RTF file.

Sorry if this is a general chunter, folks.

HarryT

06-29-2007, 11:57 AM

That's a strange one, David.

BD should certainly respect the paragraph breaks in the PG file. Did you download the file as text or HTML? Does the file look normal if you load it into, say, Windows Notepad?

David P

06-29-2007, 12:26 PM

I downloaded the text, selected "View source" to pick up the raw text in Notepad, then saved the file. I have looked at it again with Notepad - every line still has its CR attached, and there are blank lines between paragraphs.

HarryT

06-29-2007, 12:49 PM

Won't you have picked up some spurious HTML tags by doing it that way? That's probably what's messing up BD.

Load the file from PG into your web browser, then select "File/Save As..." and select "Text". That will give you plain text minus the HTML stuff.

David P

06-29-2007, 12:58 PM

Thanks. Yes, that looks like it. I brought it back in Notepad, stripped off the HTML stuff at the start, and saved it. BD took in in OK.

Any idea about the RTF/DOC crash? I have what appears to be BD 4.0, but the automatic update (if there is one) to 5.0 doesn't seem to work.

JSWolf

06-29-2007, 01:00 PM

Because you've stripped the HTML from it, you will lose the attributes put into the original HTML file. The best idea is to download the ZIPPED HTML file and then unzip it and load into BD.

HarryT

06-29-2007, 01:08 PM

Sounds like you've got the not at all uncommon problem of not having installed BD correctly, David. What you need to do is first install BD 4 using the proper installer, and then unzip the latest BD 5 update on top of it, overwriting the files. For full instructions, and links to the download files, see:

http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_Designer

Note that the icon will still say "Book Designer 4" even when it's BD5, but the "Help/About" menu item will then show you that it's v5.

RTF import should work just fine. Don't bother with DOC.

HarryT

06-29-2007, 01:09 PM

Because you've stripped the HTML from it, you will lose the attributes put into the original HTML file. The best idea is to download the ZIPPED HTML file and then unzip it and load into BD.

I agree with you - IF it's an HTML file. I got the impression from what David was saying, though, that it was a text file he was trying to load. Of course, if there's an HTML version as well as a text one, go for the HTML by preference.

RWood

06-29-2007, 01:28 PM

As for the reference and link problem in RTF files on the Sony, you are right David, the Sony does not support them. It also does not support graphics of any kind in RTF at the moment and we have no indication that that will change in the future.

If you only have the option of a TXT file and you do have MS Word, I have found that preprocessing the file with Stingo's Word Macro (a link to it is available on the MobileRead Wiki conversion page) helps a great deal. It seems better able to fix the interparagraph hard returns than BD. I use it whenever I have a TXT file to load in BD that needs line end corrections.

David P

06-29-2007, 02:39 PM

I will reinstall BD, and then continue my efforts.
Thanks for all the help.

Andanzas

07-07-2007, 09:17 PM

I'd like to upload one of my favorite books, but I am finding a rather stupid problem. I delete the final text that says:

This file was created with BookDesigner program
bookdesigner@the-ebook.org
7/7/2007

LRS to LRF parser v.0.9; Mikhail Sharonov, 2006; msh-tools.com/ebook/

However, when I create the book, it appears at the end all the same. What am I supposed to do to really delete it?

HarryT

07-08-2007, 04:07 AM

You don't delete it. This text will appear at the end of every book created with Book Designer.

Andanzas

07-08-2007, 06:50 AM

This must have been the most stupid question ever. :D I mean, how difficult could it be to check it? Oh well, I was tired.

By the way, I thought I was finished but I just ran into another problem with my book: there are some chapters that don't appear on the TOC, probably because they are too short. I remember reading something about this issue, but I can't finding it with the search function. Is there an easy fix for this?

HarryT

07-08-2007, 07:43 AM

Add a manual page break immediately before the title. As you say, there is a minimum length that a chapter has to be before it automatically appears in the TOC.

Andanzas

07-08-2007, 08:19 AM

Thanks for your help.

Unfortunately it didn't work. I've attached an image (chapter 3 is the one that is not showing up) so you can see if I did something wrong:

http://img462.imageshack.us/img462/6894/untitledue0.th.jpg (http://img462.imageshack.us/my.php?image=untitledue0.jpg)

Anyway, it's 4.00 a.m. and I should be sleeping, so I won't be able to post the book today. How frustrating, after all these hours.

HarryT

07-08-2007, 08:28 AM

Have you got the "User page breaks" box checked on the "Options" page of the "Make Sony Reader" dialog?

Andanzas

07-08-2007, 10:13 AM

Yes.

By the way, it doesn't happen just with short chapters. There is at least one chapter quite long that doesn't appear on the ToC. Maybe the problem is that this book is fairly short (it's about 200 pages on the Reader) but has 37 chapters?

David P

07-09-2007, 01:10 PM

I deleted my copy of Book Designer (see earlier) and then tried to get the ciorrect one from //wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_Designer. I don't seem to get any response from the site, but when I hit the Stop button after 5 minutes, I can see a screen about Book designer. No reaction when I click on a link though. I have tried this a couple if times, and I can see no activity at my end - the broadband activity lights are steady, and my ZoneAlarm monitor shows no activity either. Is it me? can I get Book Designer elsewhere?

David P

David P

07-09-2007, 01:29 PM

No, it woke up this time.

bookbinder

07-15-2007, 08:12 PM

Harry, in your book designer tutorial you talked about the tedium of formatting marked text.

One possible alternative is to plug it into an online formatter (i.e. http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=Text%20Formatter). I copied the text of an entire book into it and it formatted everything between underscores into lovely italic text, and deleted the underscores. It will also work with * and / markers.

NatCh

07-16-2007, 12:01 AM

bookbinder

07-16-2007, 05:37 AM

I recently noticed a setting to do that in the Tools=>Options for MS Word 2003 -- I haven't tried it out yet, though. This web tool is great for those who don't know the power of the Dark Side ... er, I mean who avoid MacroHard products. :wink:

I've tried using Word 2007's autoformat feature for that as well, but it didn't work... didn't recognize most of the instances.

NatCh

07-16-2007, 12:31 PM

Huh. Well, that makes me less optimistic about it, but I'll probably still give it a shot, when I get around to doing so, anyway. :shrug:

astra

07-22-2007, 01:13 PM

Another question from n00b :)

My question will be about footers.

A book has the following structure:

Part I: Sun
1
2
3
Part II: Moon
1
2
3
Part III: Earth
1
2
3....

All pages in Part I, chaper 1 will have a footer:
Part I: Sun. 1

however, chapter 2 will have a footer:
2

etc.

Is it possible to keep "Part I: Sun." across a whole Part I as a footer + chapter's number?
For example: in chapter 2 my footer should be:
Part I: Sun. 2 (instead of just: 2)

otherwise chapter 2 in Part I is indistinguishable from chapter 2 in Part II or III etc.

Thank you :)

aphil

09-09-2007, 07:18 PM

JSWolf

09-09-2007, 07:25 PM

Great BD tutorial, Harry. But ... my version of BD (4.0) doesn't have a button for the Sony Reader format. Also, my dialog boxes are a bit different. Is your tut written for a higher version of BD? One of my workarounds has been to get files into rtf format, which seems to translate to the SR pretty well. The best translation so far, however, is still distilling from PageMaker 7 (laid out on a Sony-size page) to a .pdf.

Understandable but pretty irritating of Sony to (try to) tie us to their CONNECT service ... BAH HUMBUG! .......... AP in NC

Your version of BD needs to be upgraded to the 07/30/2007 version found here... http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11786 (post #41 I think).

Then you'll have the ability to directly make Sony Reader (LRF) files for your reading enjoyment.

Strether

09-10-2007, 12:19 AM

A book I'm working on has 4 or 5 small tables in it. Items in one column and dollar amounts in another, to the right of the first column. Any way of making BD keep them as arranged? Read through this whole thread and I don't see it discussed, though maybe it has somewhere else and I missed it.

Thanks.

Jim

Patricia

09-10-2007, 08:52 AM

HarryT

09-10-2007, 11:22 AM

BD doesn't support tables. The option Patricia suggests will prevent them from being stripped out, but BD will convert them into plain text when the book is created.

kovidgoyal

09-10-2007, 12:15 PM

Use html2lrf

Strether

09-10-2007, 01:55 PM

Well, you're right, Harry. Changing the setting didn't work. I've been working on Thoreau's Walden and he's got 4 or 5 lists in there showing expenditures and income and you can tidy that up all you want but when the book is made, the regular columns you've created disappear.

What we need in BD is the ability to highlight text and then click a command that tells BD to leave it the hell alone. :)

Jim

aphil

09-10-2007, 09:26 PM

Had trouble with Harry's BookDesigner tutorial because I didn't realize I needed to update Ver. 4. DUH! Did that and got going again. Until ...

HELP HELP! Somehow while working on the tutorial again, I lost the menu and toolbars at the top of the page. I think I hit the "R" box in the upper left-hand corner of the screen by mistake while editing the example book. I think I've figured out that now I'm in "Reading" mode. But ... how to get back to the editing screen with the Menu and toolbar? So far I've tried CTRL E and Esc with no luck. I can't even check out Help, as that's on the menu. (F1?). When I close the program and reload the file, the same "Menu-less" screen comes up.

I'm sure there's a simple answer to this problem, but it eludes me. Anyone else run into this? I WILL conquer this program and make an .lrf file to send to my Reader. I've never considered myself computer/software illiterate, but I'm beginning to doubt myself at this point.
AP in NC

JSWolf

09-10-2007, 11:25 PM

aphil

09-11-2007, 07:01 AM

Not a reply ... a plea for HELP! .... I've lost my BD menu header and toolbar. Hit the "Reading" mode idon by mistake, I think ... how to get back?

Not sure how to navigate these forums either, so maybe my plea is going to cyberspace. Didn't think I was computer-stupid, but I'm beginning to wonder.
AP in NC

HarryT

09-11-2007, 07:29 AM

Jon has already given you the answer. Right click anywhere in the BD window, and select "editor mode" from the pop-up menu.

JSWolf

09-11-2007, 09:05 AM

lanekko

09-11-2007, 10:36 AM

SPAM REMOVED!

kovidgoyal

09-11-2007, 11:03 AM

SPAM

What a rip-off!

mdhuang

09-17-2007, 04:14 PM

Harry:

First thanks for the great BD guide, it really got me started with my own experiments. I have created a few good looking books and they don't have the slow loading TOC problem of html2lrf.

There are two things you may want to include in a new version of the guide:
1. Insert toc into text automatically.
There is no need to manually type in Contents and create the links. Just use "insert toc" or "insert toc(all)" in the menu. A nicely formated TOC is inserted just after the book author. When you make some changes to the titles, just use "delete toc" and then insert it again.

2. On options page of "Make Sony Reader File", there is a drop-down list under misc/toc. Choose "all" instead of "short". It will create a full TOC even two titles are very close to each other, which causes problem some people had discussed in this thread.

- Mark

phrodod

09-20-2007, 04:29 PM

Harry:

First thanks for the great BD guide...

- Mark

I'll second that. In the guide, there's a plea for help converting italics from PG text in a way that doesn't take hours. I've posted a link to a program (GutenMark) that converts PG texts to HTML. See the thread at http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14034 for a more complete discussion.

Phrodod

JSWolf

09-21-2007, 02:50 PM

But there is also a simple search/replace in Word we know know of to do the italics.

astra

09-22-2007, 12:11 PM

But there is also a simple search/replace in Word we know know of to do the italics.

In Word we have to find every single word with _word_ and change every single word. Their programs will find all the words and change them into italic by itself?
Say we have _bad_, _goblin_, _bull_
How can you use replace function if all the words are different. If all 3 words were goblin then yes it would be very easy.

akiburis

09-22-2007, 09:06 PM

How to use search and replace in Word to change all _words_ to words was explained a while ago in a post by ricdiogo to another thread (Macro help - itals from text). I don't know how to make a link to it--I've pasted it below:

Use _(*)_ (wildchars enabled) in the "Find" field. Then place your cursor in the "Replace" field and hit the More/Format/Font and select "Italic". Don't type anything in that field. Then "Replace all".
Then, write _ in the "Find" field (wildchars disabled). Be sure you remove the formatting instructions from the "Replace" field and that you haven't hit space bar in the field. "Replace all".

(Edit: )
If something looks wrong after you did this properly, probably the problem is that one of the _italics was not closed in the *.txt. The number of underscores in the *.txt must be a pair. Please report it to PG using errata (at) pglaf (dot) org email address.
__________________
Ricardo

Project Gutenberg
Fine Literature Digitally Re-Published
Last edited by ricdiogo : 08-23-2007 at 09:23 AM.

davidd

09-27-2007, 06:25 PM

Can this tutorial also be used to create .IMP files??

JSWolf

09-27-2007, 06:45 PM

Can this tutorial also be used to create .IMP files??
Sure can. The IMP files I've posted here were created in Book Designer.

davidd

09-27-2007, 07:13 PM

Okay, I wasn't sure how the tutorial worked since it said it was for creating the other type, Reader, I believe. I know BD can convert over to .IMP but there are things I would like to try so I've been looking for a tutorial. Thanks.

dave

davidd

09-27-2007, 07:14 PM

an afterthought. I try to use this site but I'm having just a wee bit of a time. How do I access .IMP files here, the books you and others have uploaded to this site?

dave

JSWolf

09-27-2007, 07:15 PM

an afterthought. I try to use this site but I'm having just a wee bit of a time. How do I access .IMP files here, the books you and others have uploaded to this site?

dave
Go to the ebooks section from the menu bar. Then search for IMP. and you'll find three books so far.

NatCh

09-27-2007, 07:17 PM

The easiest way to get to the e-books section would be by the "e-books" link in the blue bar way up at the top of each page. :nice:

BD will output any of the formats from the same source file -- mark it up once, make multiple formated books (what? six or eight different ones?). :yes:

JannLee

09-30-2007, 05:43 PM

JSWolf

09-30-2007, 05:55 PM

Hello, recently I got SONY Reader PRS500. I already learnd how to format a simple text in BD but I have problem with creating tables. Can someone guide me how to create a table. If I use an option insert-table I got a table in BD, but after fromating in lrf file I lost the table.
Thanks.
Currently BD does not support tables. If you really need a tables, the only option you have a the moment is to use html2lrf (part of libprs500). Html2lrf does support simple tables. So you'd be able to have your tables that way.

JohnP

10-16-2007, 05:37 AM

JSWolf

10-16-2007, 01:15 PM

Click on the Sony Libre tab. One of the drop down boxes has Sony Reader on it.
I too clicked on the latest version of BD tab that said Sony Reader. Nothing happened. I would assume that this tab is for future development. Otherwise, I would expect that the "sony reader" on the Libre conversion tab is the way to go.

It sounds like one of two issues you have going on. Either you did not install Book Designer properly or you did not update it properly. Please read the following thread the download all the files you need to do it right and how to do it right. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11786

In Book Designer the tab for the Sony Reader DOES work. You have an install issue going on.

Also after you get Book Designer installed, go to the Book Cleaner section grab the BC files and you'll make even better books. http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11649

JSWolf

10-16-2007, 01:16 PM

Can this tutorial also be used to create .IMP files??
Yes it can.

vvv

10-24-2007, 09:58 PM

Sure can. The IMP files I've posted here were created in Book Designer.
IMP's can be made for different devices (GEB1150, GEB2150, REB1200, SoftBook). But because an IMP created for a certain device may not be suitable for other ones, I would suggest to point out the device type in the book description [for example, "IMP (GEB1150)"].

Also, IMP's can be made not only in a standard format but also in a BookImage one. The last one supports unicode and allows to use some advanced formatting (for example, tables or any fonts usage). However because BookImage files are 3-5 times bigger, I would recommend to indicate a format type [for example, "IMP (BookImage)"].

JSWolf

10-24-2007, 11:05 PM

I create the text based IMP files. So would they not be device independent?

JohnP

10-29-2007, 10:01 PM

When I click on the SONY Reader tab in Make EBooks or try the SONY reader button, NOTHING HAPPENS. All the other tabs work fine and a dialog box appears. The SONY Reader button does not give me a dialog box. I have tried installing BD 4, Installing the updates one by one or the full 7.0 update, uninstalling, deleting the folder, reinstalling, again and again. I cannot get the SONY Reader tab to show anything. I am using Vista and MS Word 2007. I tried unistalling the SONY library software (just in case)! Rebooted. And then I did it all over again. The sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of something different will happen. Any ideas?:pray:

JSWolf

10-29-2007, 10:45 PM

When I click on the SONY Reader tab in Make EBooks or try the SONY reader button, NOTHING HAPPENS. All the other tabs work fine and a dialog box appears. The SONY Reader button does not give me a dialog box. I have tried installing BD 4, Installing the updates one by one or the full 7.0 update, uninstalling, deleting the folder, reinstalling, again and again. I cannot get the SONY Reader tab to show anything. I am using Vista and MS Word 2007. I tried uninstalling the SONY library software (just in case)! Rebooted. And then I did it all over again. The sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of something different will happen. Any ideas?:pray:
To properly install Book Designer using Vista read the following and it should work. I've not tried it, but others have.

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=95237#post95237

JohnP

10-30-2007, 11:21 AM

Fortunately I had a boot drive for Win XP still and BD 4.0 worked flawlesly. Windows Vista? The SONY Reader button just plain does not work. Going to edit the books in Vista and then boot into WinXP to finish.
When I click on the SONY Reader tab in Make EBooks or try the SONY reader button, NOTHING HAPPENS. All the other tabs work fine and a dialog box appears. The SONY Reader button does not give me a dialog box. I have tried installing BD 4, Installing the updates one by one or the full 7.0 update, uninstalling, deleting the folder, reinstalling, again and again. I cannot get the SONY Reader tab to show anything. I am using Vista and MS Word 2007. I tried unistalling the SONY library software (just in case)! Rebooted. And then I did it all over again. The sign of insanity is doing the same thing over and over with the expectation of something different will happen. Any ideas?:pray:

JSWolf

10-30-2007, 11:34 AM

Fortunately I had a boot drive for Win XP still and BD 4.0 worked flawlesly. Windows Vista? The SONY Reader button just plain does not work. Going to edit the books in Vista and then boot into WinXP to finish.
Did you read the message I liked in reply to your Vista problem and do what it says? If not, then you cannot say it's not Vista compatible. Others have gotten BD to work by following those directions.

JohnP

11-02-2007, 02:47 PM

Can be used with Vista? yes. Compatible with Vista? no. Besides the only thing that DOES NOT work is the SONY Reader tab. Everything else does. If someone is not using the SONY Reader, it works fine. I tried all of the kludges, workarounds, and "This worked for me" to get the SONY Reader tab to work. None of them worked for ME. Until there is a set and easy to follow way of getting the SONY reader to run, I am using XP.
Update: Heh! Just as I gave up AndyAfro came up with the solution for the Sony Reader issue. My instuctions follow.

jwhayn

11-02-2007, 05:10 PM

I finally got mine working using the following instructions. I have forgotten who published them in which thread but the instructions indeed worked. I left UAC enabled, logged in a real/full administrator account -- had to look up how to do that as not all admin accounts are full admins in Vista, performed the instructions below, and BD now works completely.
++++++++++++++++++++
++++++++++++++++++++
"quoted procedure"
In theory, yes, as long as you install it in "My Documents" rather than "Program Files", and download and installed the "DHTML Editor" control from microsoft.com that's a standard part of XP, but not supplied as standard with Vista.
A working vista version will appear when I will get a new pc (I think by the end of this year). But right now you can try to do as follows (suggested by users, I did not check it).

1. Install BookDesigner.msi to C:\Users\Goodbar\Book Designer 4.0\ (instead of C:\Program Files\Book Designer 4.0\).
2. Unpack the update (BookDesignerExe.zip) to Book Designer 4.0 directory.
3. Get "DHTML Editing Control for Applications" from
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...&displaylang=en
and install it.
4. Go to BD directory, find GflAx.dll and register it (as admin)

JohnP

11-02-2007, 05:45 PM

[1 - MAKE SURE your Book Designer Folder is not in C:\program files put it somewhere else (on another drive if possible).
2 - This is a Sony Reader UpDate Only.
3 - Download and Unzip BD Sony Reader Update into a Folder on your desktop.
4 - Goto your Main BD Directory.
5 - Drag whole contents of BD Sony Reader Update over BD Main Directory (same as you would do with a normal update).
This update should sort all errors and it should run smoothly and also allow you too use the Book Cover Option.
Hope This Helps

That got it! Started from scratch to make sure that it worked for me every time. Did not have to move the BookDesigner 4.0 directory.
1. Uninstalled the previous copy of Book Designer 4.0 and cleaned the registry with RegSupremePro (tho I do not think that BD uses the registry).
2. Installed DhtmlEd.msi from Microsoft at (do not know if this still needs to be done but I had already done it)
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=b769a4b8-48ed-41a1-8095-5a086d1937cb&displaylang=en
3. Installed JUST the BookDesigner40.msi to the default Programs directory. Comes from the BookDesigner40.zip file.
4. Unzipped the BD%20-%20SONY%20READER%20UPDATE%2031-10-2007.rar file (winzip 11 does rar files, otherwise you need to use WinRAR)
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=6944&d=1193803411
5. Copied the unzipped files and pasted them over the original files, making sure to replace all.
6. Under the tools directory in BD, I created a Sony Reader folder.
6. The SONY Reader tab now works. Make sure to set the default output to the Sony Reader folder. (Can set it to whatever, but nice to know where you sent it!)
8. When you are working on a book, use the save as under File and KNOW WHERE YOU ARE SAVING IT TO! Lost a book that way.
9. Note that I did not have to change any permissions or to fool with the .dll properties. I do have User Account Control turned off.

JohnP

11-03-2007, 12:48 PM

Is there a way to get rid of the carriage returns in a lit formatted book in bd? When doing a conversion of a Lit formatted book, sometimes the text has hard Carriage returns smack in the middle of the sentence like the example below:

Eric turned to Corporal Leone. "Want him? Or can I have
him?" He adjusted the view sight
so the Russian's
features squarely filled the glass, the lines cutting across his hard,
sombre features:
I moved the text over to MS Word and it looks fine but when copied back to BD goes to a shortened right indent, kinda like verse:
Eric turned to Corporal Leone. "Want him?
Or can I havehim?" He adjusted the view
sight so the Russian's features squarely
filled the glass, the lines cutting across
his hard, sombre features:

Needless to say, this looks really bad in an lrf converted book.

RWood

11-04-2007, 03:49 PM

I have had the same problems. It is often just a group of 10 - 20 lines in a cluster that seems to have the problem and seldom more than a few times per file. I just manually edit them in BD.

If the entire file came out that way I would go back and convert the LIT file to RTF and edit it in MSWord with Stingo's Word Macro.

JSWolf

11-04-2007, 07:43 PM

JohnP

11-06-2007, 02:58 PM

In the SONY Reader options tab in the make book window, there is a box under MISC that says TOC short, full, and all. MAKE IT FULL!
What I was getting was a beautiful list in the element browser but with an abbreviated Table of Contents or none at all in the finished book. The FULL option solved that.

JohnP

11-06-2007, 03:01 PM

JSWolf

11-06-2007, 04:15 PM

So I find a SONY Reader book that I would love to read but is a sloppy, quickly made mess. What is the best format that ABC Amber SONY Converter that BD can most easily work with? Seems like BD cannot edit acreated lrf file
ABC Amber converters output some of the crappiest files ever made. That said, if you have Word or Open Office, output to RTF. DO NOT USE THAT RTF WITH YOUR SONY! Take that RTF and load it into your word processor and resvae it to a different filename. Then you can load that into BD and format it.

JohnP

11-09-2007, 06:40 PM

After doing about 25 E-Book conversions to the SONY Reader lrf format, I have found that there are some REALLY BAD conversions out there! Here are things that I expect in a decent conversion:
1. The title should be the last name, first name dash and then the title.
2. Example: Verne, Jules – From the Earth to the Moon.lrf
3. Try to find the BEST copy of the book for conversion. A really good LIT or PDF file can make the conversion happen in less than 10 minutes. A really bad copy can take 4-5 hours.
4. All empty paragraphs (blank lines) that are not needed may be removed (my personal preference is not to have them there). This is easily done in BD by the element browser under blank paragraphs ( group delete). Nice to have a blank line under titles tho.
5. The table of contents should WORK in the finished book. There should also be no erroneous titles due to something being in all caps. Those “bonus” titles should be selected at then Alt-P to make them into a paragraph. The same with sub title. Element tab is your friend! Use it!
6. Italics should be done as there are in the book! BD sometimes will convert the italics into regular print. The worse case is to have to pull up the original copy of the book and FIND the italics and convert them over in the BD file. Can be very time consuming but once it’s done, it’s done!
7. Authors usually include a space between scenes in the book. These should be included in the book! BD can end up removing them. Sometimes Capital letters give them away. Otherwise, you again need to go to the original text and see if you can find them. The edit-find/replace can get you there pretty quickly. Elements show broken sentences which can also point them out.
8. There can be a LOT of garbage at the beginning of the book. Either delete it or put it at the end of the book. I don’t think the entire Gutenberg spiel needs to be in the front.
9. The absolutely hardest part of finishing a book is when there is spelling and grammatical errors in the book. Copying the text to MS Word and doing a spell check can be the easiest way to eliminate most of the obvious ones, but BD can really put in some zingers. The only true way is to proof read the entire book. The absolute WORST part of finishing a book. A GOOD copy of a .lit file or PDF file will eliminate almost all of these errors.
10. Pictures are optional! Only there for a second. If it works, then fine, otherwise don’t sweat it. Plenty of info on the web if you are thinking of reading the book.
11. The last step is page through the book in the SONY e-book library. Look at the table of contents. Page through the book to see if there are any obvoius errors. Fix them up and try again.
When all done, your book will be worthy of publication and a source of pride. My biggest concerns: How well will the SONY reader sell? Will it ever have a .lit option? and how do I get my masterpieces into others hands? (like with AndyAfro’s torrent for example).
Totally my two cents worth! I just hate to struggle through a slap dash conversion on such a terrific reader. I simply cannot read the small print in a paperback or hold a hard cover book any more.

JohnP

11-09-2007, 06:54 PM

So I create my masterpiece. Before converting it over, I save the file using the save as command in BD. I close everything up. Later on tho, I decide to change this or that and pull up my saved copy. What a mess! The picture is gone, the title is usually screwed up, my CAPITAL LETTERS text are now back to titles, and the entire text comes out as one big paragraph!
The only workaround I have found is to use Word to back it up. Copy and Paste the picture, then ALL of the text. Save this file. When I want to restore it, I open a blank copy of BD, type one letter then paste the whole word file back into BD. Still needs some work, but WAY better than anything else I have found.
Am I saving it wrong or something? What I am really looking for is to get the file back in JUST AS I HAD LEFT IT! No way, no how so far. Using Vista...

AnemicOak

11-09-2007, 07:32 PM

Am I saving it wrong or something? What I am really looking for is to get the file back in JUST AS I HAD LEFT IT! No way, no how so far. Using Vista...

Same thing happens to me. I haven't done much with BD since it seems like every time I try to format a book how I want it, the lit just comes out wrong somewhere, but the few I've gotten OK results with do just what you said if I go back to work on them.

HarryT

11-11-2007, 04:23 AM

Silvayn

11-11-2007, 06:38 AM

Although this is only my 3rd conversion, I was following the tutorial posted on 1st page. The first 2 conversions worked fine, but I simply can't figure out what's wrong with my last attempt. I can't get the TOC to work properly - usually (in reader and also in eBook Library) only some titles get "hotlinked" and it seems that only the first letter is linked. Could someone have a look? It's driving me crazy.

It's a collection of journal articles w/ pictures.

.html0 file in attachment.

astra

11-12-2007, 06:21 AM

I have not looked at your example, I am not that good to find a problem anyway, but I might venture to suggest you to do the following:
Go to: Makes eBooks -> Sony Reader -> options
On the right hand side of the options window there is a column named: misc
in the column you have to make sure that option "toc" is ticked (most likely it is) and in a drop-down menu next to the option "toc" you have to choose FULL (you probably have "short").
Hope it helps.
A.

JSWolf

11-12-2007, 07:49 AM

Linda

11-12-2007, 11:19 AM

astra

11-12-2007, 11:23 AM

BD can covert to LRF from many different file formats.
HTML, TXT, RTF, DOC, LIT, FB2....pdf as well but it looses all formating such as italics.
If you want to conver PDF to LRF via BD you have got to open in Adobe Pro save it as HTML v4, then load html to BD.
Or use some pdf to HTML/RTF converter, but from my experience they are worse than Adobe Pro., which is far from perfect as well....

Linda

11-12-2007, 11:54 AM

Thank you. What version of Adobe should be used?

astra

11-12-2007, 12:23 PM

Thank you. What version of Adobe should be used?

First of all, I would like to emphasize that it should be Adobe Acrobat Professional.
The latest version is 8. You can use 7 as well.

Linda

11-12-2007, 12:33 PM

I just checked out the prices for Adobe Professional - to much. Any other suggestions? I have been reading about pdflrf - but it seems as if it would be be very difficult for me to do - very technical. Have you tried it?

Thanks

HarryT

11-12-2007, 01:02 PM

astra

11-12-2007, 01:04 PM

kovidgoyal

11-12-2007, 01:10 PM

I actually find that pdftohtml does a better job than acrobat.

astra

11-12-2007, 02:19 PM

I actually find that pdftohtml does a better job than acrobat.

I have not tried it. But it is free, so it definitely worth to try out.

JohnP

11-16-2007, 05:16 PM

I agree with most of your points, John, but I'm afraid I strongly disagree with this one. The Reader allows one to list books either by title or by author. It completely defeats the "List by Title" operation if one includes the author's name in the title.

Author and title are separate items of "metadata" in the file.

The titles and authors are set up INSIDE the book. Reader could give a hoot about what you call the file. You can name it razzametaz.lrf and "From the Earth to the Moon" will still be the Title. Now BD DOES try to name the book for you when you select the convert but you can change that name to anything you want.
LOT easier to organize books if they are set up the same way. Now I have Fiction books A-Z set up by Author with folders for HTM, PDF, LIT, LRF, DOC, RTF, and TXT. Searches also will work fine for the title or the author.

HarryT

11-19-2007, 05:20 AM

The titles and authors are set up INSIDE the book. Reader could give a hoot about what you call the file. You can name it razzametaz.lrf and "From the Earth to the Moon" will still be the Title.

Yes, that's very true, but you said:

1. The title should be the last name, first name dash and then the title. Example: Verne, Jules – From the Earth to the Moon.lrf

If you actually meant that the FILE NAME should include both the author's name and the book title, then I have some sympathy with your suggestion. The file name is not, however, the title, as you point out yourself.

Personally I just name my files to be the book's title, and I store them on my hard disk in a directory structure which reflects the author. I have one folder per book, and store all the files (the original source file, the BD "LastFile" folder, and the converted files) in that folder.

Eg, in this case I'd have a folder "Verne, Jules". Within that I have a folder for each of Verne's books - "From the Earth to the Moon" in this case, and then within that folder I have all the files for that book.

astra

11-19-2007, 05:33 AM

I always add author's name to file name of a book that I either create myself or download here. Just like that :)
Verne, Jules – From the Earth to the Moon.lrf

I simple cannot stand having files on my PC without author's name.

Aprilbeginnings

11-20-2007, 04:51 PM

I have a question, has anyone shared their different saves that are .rst and sharing them? we each have our own likes for a format and was wondering if that is being shared. I was having trouble with the bookdesigner and had to remove and reinstall it, I was getting nothing but errors. So I came here to see what I could find and started reading this thread.

ultimoed

11-23-2007, 07:06 PM

Being a newbie can someone let me know where I can download a copy of Book Designer?
Thanks
ED

RosanaE

11-25-2007, 02:35 PM

Being a newbie can someone let me know where I can download a copy of Book Designer?
Thanks
ED

Try this link

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11786

and this http://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Book_Designer

RosanaE

11-25-2007, 02:39 PM

Does anybody else have this problem and figured out how to fix it?

I check the "keep empty lines" box in settings and reload the book and still no empty lines. When I look at the settings, the keep empty lines is unchecked again.

Thanks

vivaldirules

11-25-2007, 04:11 PM

RWood

11-25-2007, 05:48 PM

I love the uploads section and wanted to contribute some titles that I'm particularly interested in reading. I have 18 that I've been preparing to convert and upload here. I've been reading Harry T's tutorial, have installed BD, and I've looked at what other people have been doing for indexing, TOC, fonts, cover art, etc. Today, I stumbled on ManyBooks.net (http://www.manybooks.net) and found 16 of the titles available there for free and in more formats than I could count. I know we just hit the 2000 mark a few weeks ago here but they have nearly 20,000. I'm guessing that site grew up after the MR uploads started. Still, can you tell me why it is beneficial to continue to build a separate set of files here? Is it for reasons of special formatting, correction of errors, or something else? If so, I will be more selective in choosing titles for conversion. I'm hoping I'm not asking a sensitive question. If so, just say so and I'll upload the files anyway (when I'm done).:)
Manybooks existed and offered Sony format books long before MR started their upload section. In fact, Manybooks has served to inspire some of us to create our own versions of the books.

Manybooks uses an automated translation program that I feel leaves a lot to be desired. They are not bad; but, they could be a lot better. I think what we have produced at MR is a lot better. At a minimum they are hand crafted by people that care about the book being converted. Many of the items are fixed from the original texts to provide a better reading environment. These may be simple things like correcting the chapter titles and headers or creating an omnibus edition. Other times they involve rewriting entire sections to correct translator's censoring of language and action.

Manybooks takes the raw text of Project Gutenberg or Distributed Proofreaders and simply converts it to the multiple formats it distributes. Many times we have found them using a file that has not been completely proofed and is still full of typos and other errors. This is not the norm but it has happened enough times to make me think twice before downloading one of their books.

If given the choice (and I do have the choice) I would rather enjoy one of Harry's Tom Swift Omnibus editions than the single books from Manybooks. I love to read the Voltaire Patricia has posted with the original passages restored from the crazed censorship of the Victorian translator who thought that they knew what is best for me. Some of the books at MR are not available at Manybooks such as my own contribution of Augustine's City of God.

Sometimes you will even find multiple versions of the same book in the same format at MR that is also available at Manybooks. Each of us have our own style of book construction and some people favor one person's way over that of another.

So please contribute your books. Many will thank you.

Patricia

11-25-2007, 05:49 PM

vivaldirules

11-25-2007, 06:42 PM

Thank you both. I have enjoyed your contributions as well as Harry's. Your reasons sound very sensible. I'll be more selective about picking titles for conversion but will upload the ones I've nearly finished anyway.

On a related subject, I have some pbooks that haven't appeared on PG yet so I've been considering scanning and converting them. These are 19th century works and so I assume this should be okay but somewhere here I saw a rather definitive statement that appearance on PG was a prerequisite for uploading here. Can I get clarification, please?

JohnP

11-25-2007, 10:34 PM

Yes, I tried it. Actually, from a tech point of view it is even easier. I tried it using all defaults and it works very well. the only problem is that I don't like the output file...it is like a collections of pics of individuals pages. Cannot change font size and a few other isses. As a last resort maybe, otherwise I don't like it. But the program is superb.
Using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0, I tried to simply change the font size in a book so that it would be more easily readable. Had no luck. Just did not seem to be an option.
The only thing I find that helps a BIT is to hold the + magnify button down and flip the book 90 degrees. Still way too small for most PDFs tho.

RWood

11-25-2007, 10:48 PM

... On a related subject, I have some pbooks that haven't appeared on PG yet so I've been considering scanning and converting them. These are 19th century works and so I assume this should be okay but somewhere here I saw a rather definitive statement that appearance on PG was a prerequisite for uploading here. Can I get clarification, please?

It is not a requirement. City of God for example is not on Project Gutenberg.

The issue is one of copyright. If a book is posted on PG with a note that it seems to be out of copyright in the US then it is safe to post it here. If you are sure that the book you are posting is out of copyright (as is true of all 19th century books in the US) then post it. There are many, many books that PG has yet to convert so it may be years until they get around to the ones you have converted. (If ever.)

RWood

11-25-2007, 10:52 PM

Using Adobe Acrobat Professional 8.0, I tried to simply change the font size in a book so that it would be more easily readable. Had no luck. Just did not seem to be an option.
The only thing I find that helps a BIT is to hold the + magnify button down and flip the book 90 degrees. Still way too small for most PDFs tho.
The PDF file is designed to reporduce a page. It is a standard for many publications and advertising agencies. It was never designed to be an ebook format. To be able to change the font size goes against the program design specifications.

Many PDFs are simply a container for image files. If the PDF is a text file inside, perhaps you can extract it and create a file for viewing on your reader. I have extracted many PDFs and made quite nice Sony/LRF files for reading.

JSWolf

11-25-2007, 11:03 PM

alreds

12-10-2007, 10:06 AM

Fellow readers, thank you for this wonderful forum and that we are able to learn from each other! I'm newbie and have a question:
I was able to get started with BookDesigner and I've been experimenting with this great tool. I've been saving and copying newspaper articles and created a 500 pages word file that want to convert to read as a "lrf" file on my Reader; however BookDesigner only produced about 320 pages and left out a good portion of the original document.
Am I doing something wrong or are there any limitations on the size of the document to input into BookDesigner? I'd appreciate your response.
Thanks,
Al

shen

12-13-2007, 08:43 AM

Sparrow

12-13-2007, 10:04 AM

I'm seeing the same here ... any suggestions?

Stefan

Could there be nbsp charcters on the page instead of line breaks?

The 'View/ Show inner nbsp' might show them, if they exist delete them and replace with carriage returns.

shen

12-13-2007, 10:24 AM

That's not the problem.
In Settings, "keep empty lines" can be checked, but upon closing the settings window, it's unchecked again.
Even when checked and I click on "reload file", empty lines aren't kept.
So this setting seems to be completely ingnored. Even on a fresh installation with the latest update :(

Stefan

aheubert

01-23-2008, 12:53 PM

I'm new to the Sony reader, and new to this forum. Harry, thanks so much for your excellent tutorial. I have a question I hope you or others can answer for me. I have quite a few books nicely formatted as Word files that I'd like to upload to my reader. When I upload them directly, the reader does a very nice job of it in almost all respects, preserving leading, type sizes, justification, etc. (not the fonts themselves, but that's of less importance to me). The two things it doesn't do for me are

a) creating a nice table of contents with links on which I can click to get to each chapter; and

b) handling the footnotes.

I tried Book Designer, with the help of Harry's tutorial. It did solve a) and b) above. But it made me reformat so much of the book: putting in spurious titles, removing the page breaks, playing with the em dashes, and eliminating all the information about font size and leading.

Book Designer also had a problem I couldn't find a way around: Is there any way to get the body text to come out ragged right instead of justified? (The friend who will use the reader needs to read at a large font size, at which size the full justification often produces ugly spacing.)

What would be ideal would be to take my Word files (or HTML files, which Word can easily change them to), and just add some coding to create links for the footnotes and table of contents. Is there a way (perhaps indirect) to do that?

I saw in earlier posts that Canon has a program, no longer available for free, that's supposed to be the most full-featured one. Does anyone know whether it would address the needs I've described? If so, and if it isn't too expensive, I might spring for it.

Or would any of the other programs available be better for my purposes than Book Designer? I'm comfortable learning most any program, but only if it's well documented (which rules out those Sony programs that are mostly in Japanese).

I guess that was more than one question! Thanks very much for any suggestions any of you can offer.

lanekko

01-25-2008, 10:06 AM

JSWolf

01-25-2008, 11:45 AM

I recommend Michelangelo. I've been using it for a while and does a great job as it is an add-in for Microsoft Word so you can use all the tools MS Word Offers for formatting your ebook in minutes for your reader. http://www.prs-500formatter.com/
I've tried that program and it turned out to be not nearly as useful as advertised.

Patricia

01-25-2008, 06:04 PM

You can set the font and sizing with BD.
If you use the latest versions of Jon's Book Cleaner files (and set the language to German) then the emdashes come out fine too, (provided that you've clicked the option allowing them in the 'make sony reader book' screen).
I've found that if you centre and Bold the chapter titles in Word then BD will almost always recognise them.
The one thing that BD won't do is go for left justification only. It always seems to provide full justification.
If you don't want to experiment with BD any more, then you might try Kovid's libprs500.

ponga163

01-26-2008, 03:39 PM

Harry,
I downloaded your very helpful file and followed it faithfully. The problem I have is that BD will not finish converting to lrf. I'm using BD version 5.0 with Vista. I'm trying to convert Jefferson Davis' "The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy" and Eusebius' "History of Constantine" from HTML to lrf. Any hints?

lanekko

01-29-2008, 10:39 AM

I've tried that program and it turned out to be the biggest load of crap ever written.

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment :)

JSWolf

01-29-2008, 11:00 AM

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment :)
You came here and praised this program all over the place. I did try it and posted the results. It didn't work well. This has nothing to do with not liking you. It has to do with this program not doing what it's claimed to do. The first example (from the website) even shows it did not put the paragraphs together as the author intended. I am not saying this based on an opinion with never having tried it. I did try it and it worked very poorly.

vivaldirules

01-29-2008, 11:21 AM

I had to agree that your comment was less than useful, Jon, but I did a search and saw that you and others provided some usable info here: http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13905&highlight=michelangelo

It's too bad because I still suffer a lot with BD. My latest realization is that one should never select Reload Book unless you would like to start over and discard all the useful changes you have made to a book over the past hundred hours or so. Somehow I equated this with Open but of course it's not. I've lost two books and too many hours of work because of that. BD works, but it's just not been very friendly to me.

JSWolf

01-29-2008, 11:45 AM

Michelangelo did not do anything all that wonderful. It did not find all the proper ends of paragraphs to put them back together again. It's an add-on for MS Word. I did take some PDF that I knew by looking where the paragraphs began and ended and yes, it worked in some cases, but not all and not enough to be worth the cost. When I used it to try to change the font size, it hung. Basically, it doesn't work as advertised and it can be made to hang.

JSWolf

01-29-2008, 11:46 AM

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment :)
Can you please show us how well this program works with some screen caps please? I would like to see if maybe there is a newer version that might actually work. But when you do present the screen caps, can we also see screen caps of the original so we know it did work.

JohnP

02-01-2008, 05:43 AM

The REAL issue for ALL of these conversion programs and scripts is how good is the source material. There are seven different formats for e-books: Word Documents (DOC), web brower (HTM), Microsoft Reader (LIT), Sony Reader (LRF), Adobe PDF (PDF), Rich Text (RTF), and finally Text (TXT). There is one for Palm but is almost never found. The 3 most common are LIT, PDF, and RTF. The best formatted books are invariably in LIT format unless THEY WERE CREATED by just quickly converting a TXT or RTF file. Then the LIT book will be badly formatted.
If the LIT book is in really good shape (such as the books available in the BAEN free library), then Book Designer is a snap. 10-15 minutes cleaning up the title and author and the title page, deleting empty lines, changing the parts of the book that were mislabled as titles and subtitles back to paragraphs, and deleting the chapter info at the bottom of the book is really all that needs to be done.
Then there is everything else! There are those crappy coverted LIT books with with lots of broken sentences and lots of empty lines. PDFs can be really bad and I have yet to see one that has worked by directly converting it to LRF by BD (usually the text is way too small). Text, Rich Text, HTM, and Word Docs all seem to have to be put into Word and handcrafted and/or macroed to death before they will look halfway decent when converted to LRF.
So when you decide to convert a book, consider the source FIRST. Is this book available in different formats? Which looks best? Use the best formatted source! If none of them are well formatted, no magic wand is going to do this for you! You now have to consider it a work of love and craftmanship and not a quick and dirty way of getting a free book into your Sony Reader.
E-books are the future, folks. Make no bones about it. Hard plastic CDs are quickly being replaced by digital copies. Cameras just flipped over to 50% digital. Movies will be next. As books are the oldest form of communication and entertainment (except for the play), they are well entrenched. But ALL books put to the Library of Congress today HAVE to also be submitted digitally. Amazon, Google, many other private firms, and the US government are all trying to digitize all books that were ever published. Once automated page flippers and decent OCR programs and thousands of selfless proofreaders come together, books will all be digitized. Then the weight of publishers will DEMAND e-book readers. It WILL happen.
We are part of the inovation wedge, the first users. We deal with constantly changing standards, technology, and formats. Keep your cool and look pitingly on the poor smuck with a hardcover copy of War and Peace propped up on his belly.

JSWolf

02-01-2008, 07:49 AM

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

HarryT

02-01-2008, 09:41 AM

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

Likewise for Mobi. Just use "ConvertLit" to "explode" the LIT to OEB. Double click the "opf" package file to load into MobiPocket Creator, then click the "Build" button to build the book. Takes about 1 minute flat.

JohnP

02-08-2008, 12:04 PM

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

Well, if I had KNOWN about lit2lrf, I certianly would had tried it out! I am sure it is well documented in these forums but so is a ton of other great stuff. Coming into the whole field of book conversion cold, I have a hard time picking up on the gems. Like the french cook in "The little Mermaid" siad "Zut Alor! I have meesed one!"
I will check it out. Thanks!

achickey

03-26-2008, 10:03 AM

Harry Cheers - Been struggling to create, convert etc and finally your tutorial pointed me in the right direction.......also to solving the Comic conversion

antistar

04-06-2008, 06:23 AM

HarryT

04-06-2008, 06:48 AM

Have you installed it correctly? You need to install BD4, and then extract the latest BD5 update on top of it, overwriting the files of BD4. You should then see a curly letter "a" on the toolbar - that's the "Make Sony Reader Book" option.

JSWolf

04-06-2008, 07:57 AM

tried book designer but had no success. Can't find the option to make a lrf file and the help session didn't list lrf as a supported output format either. Can anyone help me here?

exasperated after 3 hours of trial><

Read the following thread on Book Designer

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11786

And the following thread on Book Cleaner

http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11649

mjh215

04-14-2008, 08:23 PM

If anyone wants to access the actual documentation for Book Designer or visit their forum I thought I'd give you the links. I open them using Google translation (As the are in Russian). They also have a sticky up in the forum for English questions. The main forum is http://www.the-ebook.org/forum/ and Book Designer is listed about halfway down. The documentation is http://doc.the-ebook.org/BookDesigner/

I'll also post links thru Google translator for the documentation. Whether the URL generated for me will work for you is another matter. If not, just enter the above URL's into Google's search engine and click the translate button.

http://209.85.135.104/translate_c?hl=en&u=http://doc.the-ebook.org/BookDesigner/&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.the-ebook.org/rus/%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dopera%26rls%3De n%26hs%3DH2C

Johnmuzy

08-18-2008, 07:36 AM

EatingPie

08-18-2008, 04:00 PM

I have been using BD for some time but wish to try pielrf for my Gutenberg books. I have downloaded the pielrf zip file, installed python, but cannot work out how to make pielrf work. I tried to install pielrf using the command line python setup.py install but get error messages - I found that omitting the "python" part allowed setup to work(?), but get syntax error if I enter pielrf.... into either the Dos or python command boxes.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
John
Hi John.

I suspect python isn't in your path on the DOS side. Assuming python installed in the default location, add the following two directories to your path:

C:\Python25\
C:\Python25\Scripts

The first will give you access to python.exe, the second to pielrf.

-Pie

Amystei

02-05-2009, 03:28 PM

Harry T, I wish to thank you for your fantastic tutorial. Your step by step instructions were great. I just finished creating my first lrf and it looks great! Thanks again.

Bilbo1967

03-25-2009, 06:04 PM

Hi, just completed my first .lrf using Book Designer and wanted to say a big thankyou to HarryT for his great step by step guide and also to JSWolf for his easy to follow guide to installing BD.

Just one bugbear though - I really could not get the BD software to insert a picture - just didn't seem to do anything. Sure it must be me doing something wrong :smack:, but any advice gratefully accepted please.

Patricia

03-25-2009, 06:13 PM

The hints and tips in this thread just might be useful:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36908

Are you using the Insert menu, then selecting insert picture? (or pressing f5?)

Bilbo1967

03-25-2009, 06:21 PM

Bilbo1967

03-25-2009, 06:22 PM

The hints and tips in this thread just might be useful:
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=36908

Are you using the Insert menu, then selecting insert picture? (or pressing f5?)

Tried both.

Patricia

03-25-2009, 07:28 PM

Tried both.

HarryT also notes that just dragging and dropping into BD works.

What format are the pictures? And what size, approximately?

Bilbo1967

03-25-2009, 08:07 PM

Really appreciate your help Patricia.

File was a JPEG and 6.71kb.

Patricia

03-25-2009, 08:29 PM

This is very mysterious. Jpeg is certainly a supported format.

This is what I'm doing:
1. I select Insert, then Insert Picture.
2. The graphics pane then opens. I drag and drop the picture into the picture slot.
3. Then I go to the align option. Usually I choose the middle option, which centres the picture in the text.
4. I also have a quick look at the size. The reader screen is 600 X 800 pixels, so there's no point in having a picture bigger than that. So I resize if necessary.
5. Finally, I press the insert button (the left-hand one). Then the picture should appear in the text.

Finally, when you actually make a Sony LRF book, in the make sony reader book pane, click on the options tab and choose a picture size.

Do describe what you are doing, Bilbo1967.

Bilbo1967

03-26-2009, 06:07 PM

Patricia.

I was pretty sure I did exactly what you described and just to be sure I just tried to insert a picture following exactly the steps you described. Still nothing!

When I drag and drop the picture I don't see the picture in frame or the main BD page, although the src file name is populated with "pRnd_0858090160.jpg" (which isn't what it's actually called but I assume this is some kind of alias?). I then do exactly what you said (align middle and click insert) and nothing happens. I have now tried this a number of times with no joy and am really frustrated! :chinscratch:

Patricia

03-26-2009, 07:33 PM

I'm a bit puzzled too. I can't think of any reason why this shouldn't be working.
Does anyone else have any ideas?

astra

03-27-2009, 07:57 AM

No idea.
It never happened to me before. I use "insert picture" dialog.

Bilbo1967
Maybe there is something wrong with your picture?
Would it be possible to upload it over here, so we can test it?

HarryT

03-27-2009, 08:08 AM

Hi Bilbo,

When you drag and drop the picture into BD, are you seeing the "frame" where the picture should be, or is nothing whatsoever appearing in the window?

Can you confirm that you are using BD5? ie you've installed BD4, and then applied the BD5 update to it?

Bilbo1967

03-27-2009, 05:52 PM

Harry - in answer to your question - I was getting absolutely nothing, but see below....

....OK - latest update everyone.

I now have the picture in my BD file - just playing around with this in frustration and noticed that both the fields below the 'Keep Ratio' check box were blank. If I put numbers (any numbers) in there, my picture then appears in the file - and can be tweaked to the right size by adjusting those numbers. Is this something I should have known or is it a bit of a glitch?

Having got it in there though it's still a bit weird, i.e. I can't delete the picture (not that I want to, but I'm a software tester by profession and just like to try these things out!), or move the picture, and it doesn't appear in the book when I make it a .lrf file and move it to my Reader. I'm putting this down to the fact that I messed about with this so much I've done something daft somewhere. I'll try a 'fresh' file soon and see what happens.

BTW - as a new member, I'd just like to thank all of you who have given some of your valuable time to help me out with this - THANKS :thumbsup:

astra

03-27-2009, 06:10 PM

At least two points I think I can address.

1. If you double click the pic, it will be "highlighted" and a dialog Insert/Edit Picture (that allows you to insert picture and its size) will appear. There is a button - delete. Click on it.

2. When you use Insert/Edit Picture box to insert a picture, initially almost all fields are empty/void of numbers, however, when you browse for the pic, find it, click on select and it appears in the file line of the Insert/Edit Picture box, then some numbers appear, such as width, height, percentages and true size of the pic in pixels. I usually use insert button next to from clip button.

If the picture is huge, then I would resize it in any picture editor, such as IrfanView.

Didn't have much success with align feature.
Right now it is set to Baseline and there is no tick in in line.