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Old 01-23-2008, 11:53 AM   #212
aheubert
Junior Member
aheubert began at the beginning.
 
Posts: 1
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Join Date: Jan 2008
Device: Sony PRS-505
Creating e-books from nicely formatted Word files

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.
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