After working with your suggestions, I've come to the conclusion we need to offer more than one format, which preliminarily would be EPUB because it's supported in all formats except Kindle and MOBI for the Kindle. Also because of what dwig said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by dwig
Personally, I would recommend that you look to posting both MOBI and ePub. These will cover the vast majority of users. If your market is dominantly Europe, then it might be adequate to post only ePub.
One thing to consider is that Amazon promotes their reader toward a non-geek market, likely resulting in a larger percentage of users that aren't skilled in conversion compared to the ePub community.
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I've gotten some good results. After making a few more changes in the source file in Word 2008 for Mac, converting that to HTML and then converting HTML to MOBI, I've gotten an e-book that looks good and works well in Kindle for Mac. The EPUB file converted from HTML looks good in Sigil and the Calibre viewer.
Some questions:
Opening the EPUB file in the Barnes and Noble viewer, the lines of text are shifted and indented strangely: many lines look like they're centered. How can this be corrected?
A PDB file converted from either HTML or EPUB viewed in the Calibre viewer or B&N reader loses all font formatting (no bold, italics, font size variations). There's no book cover or publisher logo GIF. Why is this happening?
How accurately does the Calibre viewer depict the actual book in each format? The MOBI book looks different in Calibre than it does in Kindle for Mac: for example, Calibre changes the font from serif to non-serif.
Just how poorly or how well can I expect an EPUB file to be displayed on the many different devices?
Quote:
Originally Posted by itimpi
HTML will almost always be the best source format if you can get a good version. Resulting conversions should look just like they would in a browser as long as you have not used a feature not supported by the particular format. Calibre always converts any other format to HTML as an intermediate step in conversion anyway.
If using Word for the source files, then saving as Web Page (filtered) produces the best results. As to specifics of particular formats hopefully someone else will have a view.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dwanthny
When you save Word documents as html the amount of crap that is created in the css file is astronomical. Saving the Word document as web page filtered is better but still has a lot of baggage.
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Word 2008 for Mac doesn't offer a web page filtered option, but you can "Save as Web Page" and then select "Save only display information into HTML" Is this the same thing? It produces smaller files than the other option, "Save entire file into HTML". Even so, as you say, dwanthy, I noticed a lot of things in CSS like
@font-face {
font-family: "Courier New";
panose-1: 2 7 3 9 2 2 5 2 4 4
}
for a gazillion different fonts. Does it make any sense to delete these in Sigil, keeping references only to fonts actually used?
Quote:
Originally Posted by phenomshel
Don't forget encoding with HTML files. The encoding of the source HTML files must be the same as what calibre is expecting, or you will end up with odd errors concerning apostrophes and quotation marks. Either you will get none of both, or odd characters in place of, neither of which is ideal. See the manual for more details, here: http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/faq.html#id15 |
I don't understand what to do with this. Could someone add a bit more detail as to what this means and what specific action to take?
Thanks again for all your help!