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RWood · 07-01-2008, 05:19 PM

Returning to the main point of today’s symposium (and leaving the Land of Oz, where the men are men and the sheep are afraid), BookDesigner. I should note at this point that currently I use it to produce Sony BBeB/LRF, Mobi/PRC, and eBookwise/IMP eBooks. Most of the following is based on observations made in the LRF and PRC format books.

Building on Patricia’s earlier comments, we turn our attention first to the ever-popular TOC in DB. For most books, I use the Automatic TOC and relocate it where I want it -- after the book title page I created. It picks up everything identified as “Title” in the BD paragraph tagging system.

Text topic on the agenda is paragraph styles. I stick to BookTItle, Arthur, Title, Subtitle, Body, and Verse. Everything else is a bit undefined at the moment and has not produced consistent results for me. Sometimes applying a change to an existing paragraph style can result in it becoming another style without identified itself as such. For example, if I was to center a short line and bold it then in the resultant eBook it will shift into a Subtitle and shift font if the Body and Subtitle paragraph styles have different fonts defined. This bothers me the most when setting the “slug” line under a graphic.

New pages were a pain for me at the start. I start all Chapters with a Title paragraph and expect them to start at the top of a page. After so many lines this is true. I play it safe and put a page break before each Chapter Title. This works on Sony, I think it worked once upon a time for Mobi although with the current revision it seems to have stopped, and I am not sure about the IMP format.

As Patricia said, anytime you reload a file you lose all of your edits. Invoking just BookDesigner reloads the last file used at the state of its last save. Save early and often.

Source files and editing in BD. I don’t like editing in BD and avoid it as much as I can. I rather like a “Load & Go” approach where I do most of my editing in Word or UltraEdit and then transfer the DOC, RTF, or TXT file to DB. I use Stingo’s Word Macro for converting TXT files to real paragraphs. I found early on that I did not like the choices DB mad for me. HTML editing has been so imprecise for me that I shy away from it unless I have to. Many times I have loaded a book into BD from HTML only to find that DB has converted this epic novel into a single paragraph that ran from page 1 to page 2,805. (Plus it ate the graphics.)

What’s next? Oh, a pop quiz on BookDesigner. All those wishing to avoid the quiz, the crocs are in the next room.

07-01-2008, 05:19 PM	#33
RWood Technogeezer Posts: 7,233 Karma: 1601464 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Virginia, USA Device: Sony PRS-500	Returning to the main point of today’s symposium (and leaving the Land of Oz, where the men are men and the sheep are afraid), BookDesigner. I should note at this point that currently I use it to produce Sony BBeB/LRF, Mobi/PRC, and eBookwise/IMP eBooks. Most of the following is based on observations made in the LRF and PRC format books. Building on Patricia’s earlier comments, we turn our attention first to the ever-popular TOC in DB. For most books, I use the Automatic TOC and relocate it where I want it -- after the book title page I created. It picks up everything identified as “Title” in the BD paragraph tagging system. Text topic on the agenda is paragraph styles. I stick to BookTItle, Arthur, Title, Subtitle, Body, and Verse. Everything else is a bit undefined at the moment and has not produced consistent results for me. Sometimes applying a change to an existing paragraph style can result in it becoming another style without identified itself as such. For example, if I was to center a short line and bold it then in the resultant eBook it will shift into a Subtitle and shift font if the Body and Subtitle paragraph styles have different fonts defined. This bothers me the most when setting the “slug” line under a graphic. New pages were a pain for me at the start. I start all Chapters with a Title paragraph and expect them to start at the top of a page. After so many lines this is true. I play it safe and put a page break before each Chapter Title. This works on Sony, I think it worked once upon a time for Mobi although with the current revision it seems to have stopped, and I am not sure about the IMP format. As Patricia said, anytime you reload a file you lose all of your edits. Invoking just BookDesigner reloads the last file used at the state of its last save. Save early and often. Source files and editing in BD. I don’t like editing in BD and avoid it as much as I can. I rather like a “Load & Go” approach where I do most of my editing in Word or UltraEdit and then transfer the DOC, RTF, or TXT file to DB. I use Stingo’s Word Macro for converting TXT files to real paragraphs. I found early on that I did not like the choices DB mad for me. HTML editing has been so imprecise for me that I shy away from it unless I have to. Many times I have loaded a book into BD from HTML only to find that DB has converted this epic novel into a single paragraph that ran from page 1 to page 2,805. (Plus it ate the graphics.) What’s next? Oh, a pop quiz on BookDesigner. All those wishing to avoid the quiz, the crocs are in the next room.