Quote:
Originally Posted by wallcraft
If you want to sell from established ebook sites, then you have to do what they want in terms of formatting. So your first job is finding the sites you want to deal with.
If you want to produce DRM-free ebooks in multiple formats to (say) sell from your own web site, then I suggest starting with PDF (even though not many people here prefer this) because it is often the most downloaded format. Open Office has a very good PDF export option, and Word Perfect might as well (if not, see if Open Office will import your word perfect files). One way to support EInk devices is to produce a 2nd PDF formated for a small screen. A typical PDF template (from FeedBooks) is: However, what you are probably looking for is advice on reflowable formats. The best starting point is a clean single-file HTML (plus images). Again, Word Perfect might be able to produce one for you. Then I would use Calibre to import the HTML and export LRF, ePub and MOBI (and LIT, although this requires using the command line). Calibre has its own forum here. It is not primarily an authoring tool, but if you have a clean HTML version it can do a very good format shift to other formats and it will in addition detect chapters and add a TOC for you. This is where you may have to play with your HTML or with Calibre's "rules" for chapters to get the output to your liking. Spending some time on your first ebook transfer will make the others smoother. Note that if you don't have a HTML version, Calibre can import PDF (if it is very clean, which it might be coming directly from Word Perfect), or multi-file HTML, and several other formats. Generally, HTML is best and single file HTML is simplest.
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Of course, this totally ignores the fact that PDF cannot, at this time, re-size the fonts from 9pt to, 14pt, 18pt or 24pt on the fly. Thus, for those of us who find ourselves reading in a wide variety of lighting levels, PDF is absolutely CRAP for an e-ink reader.
Stick with RTF or XHTML as your base format.
Derek