Quote:
Originally Posted by entropy
Thanks for all the great thoughts and ideas.
My plan of action is...
type up the 20 or so recipes that are not already electronic
create a table of contents using the Open Office extension deadgloves recommended
make it into an epub file
Will keep Atlantis in mind if I think of other projects like this.
Thanks again for all your help, and I will report back.
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Open Office is the way to go.
Once you figure out how to use 'header 1', 'header 2', etc to create your chapter headings so that Open Office will auto-convert them into a valid TOC when you export the document, everything should be fine.
EPUB should work nicely, but it can be a little complicated to get the formatting and TOC to work the way you expect.
Another more 'what you see is what you get' option would be to use PDF format.
PDF gets blasted around here because material formated for full sized 8 1/2 x 11 pages doesn't look good squeezed onto a tiny 4 inch screen (Duhhh
) but if you format it appropriately to match your small screen it will work very nicely indeed. That's why Sony ships the PRS-350 with a PDF formatted user manual.
Open Office will let you export directly to PDF right out of the box, and if you select the export option to export 'bookmarks', your TOC and other hyper-links are preserved in the PDF perfectly.
The main thing to remember as you format PDF pages for the 350 is to -
USE REALLY BIG FONTS
Or alternately, you can change your page size setting in OpenOffice to a smaller size (say 3 3/4 x 5 inches instead of 8 1/2 x 11) which will also make the fonts look bigger by changing the page size in the PDF so the PRS-350 doesn't have to scale it down so much.
Another tricky thing is to get the PDF to show up with the correct title and author tags as you want them to in your main book listings on the Sony.
When you export the PDF, the 'creator' (author) tags should get set based on the "First Name" and "Last Name" USER DATA info you have set in the OpenOffice options menu, and the internal PDF document 'title' tag gets set based on the title set for the document individually by opening and editing the document "Properties" from the "File" menu in OpenOffice.
EPUB's are also a good format, and if you do choose to go that route you can either use the OpenOffice optional EPUB export plugin, or for more flexibility in the final formatting, you can save the document as an HTML 'Web Document' and them import it into the free Sigil EPUB editor for final layout and conversion to EPUB.
In general EPUB format is better when we want the be able to easily change font sizes from the PRS-350 while reading. This works best with simple text prose without complex formatting.
If you want to control exact formatting on each page and control exactly where page breaks occur then PDF is best (for example, to create a nicely formatted table to list your recipes ingredients and make sure that it is not split across two pages.)
PDF's also have the advantage that you could, if you wanted, email them to a friend, and they will open up in Adobe Acrobat on any PC.
Also, if you are reasonably careful about using clean simple formatting, the PDFs you create will work on virtually all other portable ebook readers, including normally incompatible devices like Nooks, Kindles, as well as your Sony (EPUB doesn't work on Kindles, but PDF will).