Help Creating Epub Book!! Help!!

[Joshua Shapiro]

Hello fellow ePub readers and authors,

if there is anyone here who understand how to make an ePub book
I would be very grateful

here is my status

I am creating my e-books in MS Word and saving the file
as a filtered HTML

then I have my book already optimized for Kindle so I had
to make a few changes to the html so it would look correct
(width=0 in the <p> command and made sure all the
headers for table of contents are h1, h2, or h3

I also included pagebreaks around my photos

now when I used AVS document converter to change
my html file into ePub I saw the following issues
and I do have Sigil if this tool will help me correct it

1) how do I place the cover as the first page
(in mobipocket creator I specified this)

2) the pages did not flow properly - maybe due
to the html code for a page break?

3) the table of contents was not recognized

4) it appears an extra page was added in ePub
called titlepage.html which included the first part
of my book which was repeated for another page
called chapter1.html

are we able to create separate html pages
for each chapter and appendix?

anyway I think I am very close to have our ePub
version done, all the photos transferred but
just need a bit of guidance from an expert

just like now I can help someone do a Kindle e-book

if we could speak directly via email or skype
that would be great

my email is crystalskullexplorers@gmail.com

I am thinking since I design my own webpages
Sigil will let me do the same to create an ePub
document rather then hope Calibre converts it
properly but as I recall Calibre did ask questions
about the document like Mobipociket creator

anyway if anyone can help I would be glad
to include you in our book and promote something

thanks

Joshua Shapiro

[JSWolf]

The first thing to do is takes the filtered HTML and remove all the garbage that Word adds in. Make it clean code. Makes all the ToC header surrounded with h2. Take out any links to the cover. Keep the cover image separate. Use Calibre to convert the cleaned code to ePub. You can specify the cover image there. Also specify to keep the aspect ratio of the cover. See how it comes out. You can edit it from there in Sigil if it's good enough.

[eping]

Why not try ePub Maker (see my signature)?
It can remove all the garbage, arrange the cover, split chapters, extract TOC,
pass epubcheck, all automatically.
Though it's not a freeware, it can save a lot of time and work, create much more value
than its price.

[AlexBell]

Welcome to the forum, Joshua. I'm sure you'll get a lot of good advice here. Could I suggest that you check out the stickies?

Regards, Alex

[Pablo]

You could have a look at my Quick and Dirty ePub Tutorial

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by eping

Why not try ePub Maker (see my signature)?
It can remove all the garbage, arrange the cover, split chapters, extract TOC,
pass epubcheck, all automatically.
Though it's not a freeware, it can save a lot of time and work, create much more value
than its price.

I hate to say this, but I will because it needs to be said...The code in one of your sample ePub is nasty. The CSS is a confusing mess and to fix it up will take some time. I even found a class being used that's not in the CSS. That's very bad form and it won't pass validation. The sample is just not all that good. I've said this many times, when writing to make an eBook, stay away from Word.

[eping]

Thanks for your comment.
I will review the samples.

About away from Word, I think it's difficult for common users.

[Toxaris]

It is perfectly acceptable to use Word, just as long as you follow some rules:
- use filtered HTML
- don't use the Word internal CSS stylesheets
- use Word Styles and match those to you own stylesheet
- clean up most of the code from Word.

If you follow those rules, Word can be used without problems. In fact, the step from Word to ePub usually takes me only 15 minutes.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

It is perfectly acceptable to use Word, just as long as you follow some rules:
- use filtered HTML
- don't use the Word internal CSS stylesheets
- use Word Styles and match those to you own stylesheet
- clean up most of the code from Word.

If you follow those rules, Word can be used without problems. In fact, the step from Word to ePub usually takes me only 15 minutes.

Another option.. save as text and do the markup to make Calibre do the proper conversion.

[Joshua Shapiro]

Thanks everyone for sharing but I found a good solution suggested by another member Alex, its called Atlantis Word Processor

it can read the word files and then converts it into ePub - I imported my ebook in word and then converted it and ran it through ePub validator which showed no errors

now I need help with the presentation - again is there someone I can speak to live - who has done their own ePub books - I believe through Atlantis I can create the toc
and also I think in ePub if you embed the fonts then the ebook will show with the
fonts you want (when I used Sigil it shows a folder in the ePub for fonts)

so just a few more tips and we are ready to go

my challenge is we use a lot of digital photos which makes it a bit of challenge for how the book shows up without specific pages

thanks

Joshua

[angelacat]

Hi,
converting word to ePub book, here is a related post on makeuseof.com! Also hot topic and along with many discussions.

http://www.makeuseof.com/answers/con...ents-epub-pdf/

[angelacat]

Again Atlantis Word Processor seems a good program worth trying!