Quote:
Originally Posted by Justin Nemo
Here's a little experiment I tried.
I converted an Open Office ODT file to epub and mobi in Calibre. The formatting was all over the place. I then edited the epub file in Sigil, which worked really well and is a great little program. Then I converted my newly Sigled epub to mobi in Calibre and the formatting was still all over the place in the mobi. So what is the best way to format your book?
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I was trying to correct the spacing, punctuation, typos on some of my .mobi files (and I am a complete amateur at all this... no python and coding in my repertoire...) and this path of conversion seemed to work pretty well for me, however it uses quite a bit of them
but all the tools I used were free and relatively intuitive.
I converted the .mobi to .txt in Calibre, opened the .txt in OpenOffice Writer, did a select all and deleted any formatting, so I had a plain .odt file to edit. Once I had it edited as close to my physical copy of the book (I even scanned the maps and pictures and inserted them into the document, used character map for my Em Dashes, etc), I used the Export as PDF function to get a .pdf from the .odt. I used Calibre to convert the .pdf to .epub and used Sigil to edit the .epub with the headers for a generated TOC, add some italicizing, change font size, etc. It took some trial and error with Sigil as it didn't always convert back in Calibre from .epub to .mobi exactly as I expected. But, in the end, I had a practically perfect Kindle version.
I may try playing with the CSS classes as Blossom does, just to see if that helps in the conversions.
Anyway, that's how I got the best results when editing.