[bingle]

So, to continue the odyssey ;-)

I've mostly been playing with BookDesigner over the past few days. The reason for the switch is that LRF files show up with the correct author and title information, and can also preserve links. I tried converting from HTML, LIT and RTF to LRF, the examples below come mostly from a LIT file with embedded cover art, a table of contents, and lots of footnotes. In MS Reader, the footnotes show up as links, mousing over them pops up a box with the footnote text.

At first, using the Sony Librie export created texts with big blank pages, every other page. However, by forcing 26 lines per page and a page width of slightly less than the default 600, I got good-looking LRF files. I even was able to get Tables of Contents with links that jumped to chapter headings! Very promising, especially for reference books. One downside was that the table of contents was created at the very end of the book, along with all the other links (including linked footnotes).

Another downside was that the footnotes didn't work - the links weren't created correctly. In any case, the ideal book conversion wouldn't create *linked* footnotes, but rather create the pages so that the footnotes were inserted at the bottom of the correct page.

But really, BookDesigner created some excellent results. It has tons of options for the output file, including auto-hyphenation, and the resulting files look fantastic on the Reader, with included title pages and nice page headers with the name of the author and title as well as page numbers showing the current page and total page count. Unfortunately, the help is somewhat limited; I couldn't find any information on footnotes, for example. Also, getting the beautiful results definitely takes a little work: at least a quick glance through to catch mis-assigned "title" elements and such. Luckily, the software makes it easy to do, once you learn the interface.

I'll keep experimenting, and see if I can figure out some solution for footnotes other than manual editing.

Edit: Another problem. The software doesn't always make a full file, and it's not clear when it fails. So you might only get 275/350 pages or so (which, needless to say, will be incredibly frustrating when you reach that point...)