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Old 10-12-2011, 06:00 PM   #1
internolivia
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[Old Thread] Preserving Layout with epub

If someone could help me with this I'd be forever in their debt.

Basically the magazine I work for is trying to make an ebook out of the magazine. When I used calibre to convert pdfs to epub files they layout still wasn't great and the pictures got really messed up.

How are other magazines doing this? Are they using jpgs? Because if so I can't figure out how to convert them.

Help pwease!

Thanks!
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Old 10-12-2011, 06:19 PM   #2
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You'll probably have more luck in the epub forum or the calibre forum.
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Old 10-12-2011, 06:19 PM   #3
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Do you have to start with PDF - that is the worst format to start from if you want to try and preserve any layout.
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Old 10-12-2011, 06:28 PM   #4
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Epub is basically html in a zip file, so design it in an html editor. You need to design it like a 1990s website though, so that it will reflow to fit any device and work with any base font/size the reader has set. If you try to force a rigid structure like a magazine layout it won't work for everyone and will just annoy people.

If you have a Kindle, look at how the scifi and mystery magazines do it for their ebook editions. The free sample should give you enough of an idea of how to approach it.
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Old 10-12-2011, 06:44 PM   #5
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What are you using to make the PDFs? Adobe InDesign has a ePub export option.

Direct PDF to anything else conversion, well, sucks. What ever you made the PDF with will be best to convert to epub.
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Old 10-14-2011, 04:48 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mr ploppy View Post
Epub is basically html in a zip file, so design it in an html editor. You need to design it like a 1990s website though, so that it will reflow to fit any device and work with any base font/size the reader has set. If you try to force a rigid structure like a magazine layout it won't work for everyone and will just annoy people.

If you have a Kindle, look at how the scifi and mystery magazines do it for their ebook editions. The free sample should give you enough of an idea of how to approach it.
This. You either need to reset expectations or you need to use a format that allows for such precise control over layout (like PDF, ugh). As an aside, that's basically what Kindle magazines are doing -- PDF wrapped in an azw container. They're not Mobi files (Mobi is much closer to EPUB than it is to PDF).

The only thing I'd change about your description is that you shouldn't design like a 1990s web page (tables everywhere!! !! !! uu!!), but instead design like you should be doing for the web today*, with fluid layouts that accommodate flexible display sizes and use CSS for styling. EPUB doesn't support everything that a modern browser would, but in general it can do pretty much everything you need in order to create a nice-looking layout.

To play in the web and ebook spaces you need to get rid of old "paper mentalities". You no longer have pixel-perfect control over every single element in your layout as you would on a piece of paper. Your reader might have a larger or smaller font than you wanted, or might be reading on a 320x480 screen instead of a 1024x768 screen, or (on the web) may be using user scripts and styles and/or ad blockers and proxies that filter, change, rearrange, redefine, and otherwise mold your content into how they want to read it. If that's not something you're ready for, stick to paper.

* Unfortunately very few web sites are actually designed correctly. It's all too common to see fixed-layout sites with a narrow ~600px (or less!) content frame with tons of wasted white space on larger screens. Even MobileRead is not immune to this (it uses a fixed-layout design, though it's at least a generous 920px of content where many sites will dedicate as little as 300px for the main content panel). Most sites also define font sizes and margins in px, making it impossible to change font sizes for accessibility without resorting to full-page zoom (one of the worst inventions of modern web browsers, IMHO, a crutch made necessary because nobody uses scalable units like em or % anymore). Thankfully tools like Stylish for Firefox and Chrome and Greasemonkey-style user scripting allow users to take back control of the web. It's just sad that nobody cares about good web design anymore.
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Old 10-15-2011, 03:31 AM   #7
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I understand that Elizabeth Castro of EPUB straight to the Point fame has done some work on fixed layout ePub. Since I entirely agree with toddos I didn't read the article, but it might be what you are looking for. The book is excellent.
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Old 06-03-2014, 02:57 AM   #8
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Cool Looks like a nish nish with input on PDF's

Heres what I found on calibres Conversion section. It sucks because I was doing the same thing as you bud. Now I have to do some HTML. The PDF input to EPUB would make life a lot easier for me. That's ok im fine with the HTML. http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conversion.html

As the converison site says.

Some limitations of PDF input are:

Complex, multi-column, and image based documents are not supported.
Extraction of vector images and tables from within the document is also not supported.
Some PDFs use special glyphs to represent ll or ff or fi, etc. Conversion of these may or may not work depending on just how they are represented internally in the PDF.
Links and Tables of Contents are not supported
PDFs that use embedded non-unicode fonts to represent non-English characters will result in garbled output for those characters
Some PDFs are made up of photographs of the page with OCRed text behind them. In such cases calibre uses the OCRed text, which can be very different from what you see when you view the PDF file
PDFs that are used to display complex text, like right to left languages and math typesetting will not convert correctly
To re-iterate PDF is a really, really bad format to use as input. If you absolutely must use PDF, then be prepared for an output ranging anywhere from decent to unusable, depending on the input PDF.
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Old 06-03-2014, 05:24 AM   #9
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Welcome to Mobileread.

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Heres what I found on calibres Conversion section. It sucks because I was doing the same thing as you bud.
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Old 06-04-2014, 03:15 PM   #10
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Found these two lately they work really well for PDF to EPUB conversions.

http://www.pdftoepub.com/
http://www.vibosoft.com/ebook/conver...c-windows.html
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