After several frustrating attempts to use Book Designer -- and yes, I was following Harry T's excellent tutorial -- I finally managed to create some books.
I like the quality of the MobiPocket book, finalized as recommended with MobiPocket Creator. I downloaded it to my Kindle and the only thing I want to re-work is the size of the illustrations within the book so that the caption will be placed on the same page as the image.
I produced Sony and IMP formats (two sizes, if I did it right) directly from Book Designer. BD showed me the IMP books immediately after creating them, but I can't figure out how to coerce it into letting me view them later. Since BD didn't display the Sony version, I have no idea what it looks like. Would someone please check these versions and let me know if I've gotten them right or what I need to do to fix problems?
Some comments:
1 - I am a fan of proper m-dashes, so I was appalled when I saw that BD converted all the -- or — in the input file to a simple hyphen. I had spent over an hour editing the generated .htm file and carefully putting in the — HTML symbols, but when I re-imported the modified HTML file into BD, it was all for naught. The Wiki tells me:
Quote:
By default, middle and long dashes are converted to the short ones during the initial book formatting. But if you want to keep them, do as follows
1. Tools -> Book Cleaner
2. In Book Cleaner at the bottom of the pop up box, in "input file: before formatting": choose "MiddleDashes_before.bcf" and in "input file: after formatting": choose "MiddleDashes_after.bcf"
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Well, sorry. The only option in the pull-down is RemoveRepeatedEmptyLines.bcf -- so where did the MiddleDashes stuff come from? But, since I was using MobiPocket Creator, I just used my updated HTML file as input and so the Mobi version of the book has proper m-dashes.
2 - I don't know how to create curly quotes. I'd like to try, but I need a formula.
So -- here are the books I have created. After receiving comments and recommended corrections/fixes, I'll upload into the proper places in the forum so the books will show up in the directory of available ebooks.
The Bobbsey Twins, by Laura Lee Hope. Original file from Project Gutenberg.