This is a low-level trial report made by an average Linux user. My point is that we have the tools to get good and easy results for standard EPUB creation and I try to prove it.
I learnt these last days how to use OpenOffice to get later a nice enough EPUB from Sigil. I started from an odt file realized with OpenOffice 3.2,
I exported it to html format using
Writer2xhtml extension in OpenOffice and in the end made an EPUB out of it using
Sigil 0.2 beta
Please note that I only used standard settings with
Writer2xhtml and
Sigil Everything has been processed automatically in a push-button way.
You'll find in the attached zip file:
- the original odt file
- my template (in .ott format)
- the html file with its attached image folder created with
Writer2xhtml extension
- the EPUB file created with
Sigil 0.2
- two screenshots
1- OpenOffice working space
2-
Writer2xhtml settings
COMMENTS
There are some precautions to take with OpenOffice.
Styles
This is the most important point.
You should be aware that OpenOffice knows two kind of styles:
- the so-called
normal styles, written in
styles.xml. These are edited with the "stylist" (F11). Among them, "html" styles.
- the so-called
automatic styles, written in
content.xml. You can edit them directly using the menu "Format/paragraph".
To avoid later unnecessary clutter on your css file, it is advised to use consistently
only F11 (stylist) to work with styles. For better even results select "html styles" (see joint screenshot)
Text
I took care to eradicate the so-called "soft-hyphens" which are presently not going well with Sigil.
Line-height
I found that a line-height of 120% gives later better viewing results on the EPUB. You can edit your styles in OpenOffice to give them this property.
Chapterbreaks
My Title 2 style creates a "pagebreak before".
Images
Images can be processed and placed easily within OpenOffice, including with reduced sizes.It's more tricky to get wrapped text around them in your EPUB. As this is yet beyond my beginner's level, I tried only to keep images chained after a text block.
Footnotes, numbering of chapters are easily processed.