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retiredbiker · 05-24-2020, 08:38 PM

I'm currently working with an Author to produce several volumes, all of which will be formatted the same. It's very highly formatted stuff...verse, images, lots of quotations, attributions, and so on. Also using Writer with Linux. Two volumes done so far. So, perfect fit.

I can't begin to describe all the hoops we've been through to get it right, but the basics are:

Use Styles in Writer, and nothing but styles, except for the odd italic word. Make yourself a style template, and stick to it like glue. Look in LO help under "styles and templates" to learn how, it is not that hard. Definitely worth the trouble! Give the styles you create good names. The second and subsequent books MUST use the exact same styles or you haven't a hope. (We are doing both epub and print versions, so its even more important.)

After the first book is just the way you want it in Writer, convert to epub. (Yes, saving to .docx is fine.) Then go into the editor, and correct or change anything you want. The conversion will probably not give a really tight well-coded book. Simplify the CSS. Give the styles meaningful names--but if you named them right in Writer, this should not be an issue. Get rid of any css classes you don't end up using. Then save (export) this css. When you do book 2, import it, replacing whatever the second conversion makes. Link it to all the files. Go through and make sure all the text is using exactly the same rules as the first book. If the styles in books one and 2 were identical in Writer, this will not be very hard.

If you want a picture at the top of each page, for your epub to work best on a range of readers, each page should be its own html file. May not be practical, so "pagebreak" codes can be used. Not sure if they come across well or not in your conversion, they always give me trouble. No problem with all that in an epub, but the text will flow, so if your user chooses a nice huge font size, the "page" will be several screens.

This doesn't begin to cover all the potential oop-es, but it is the core of our project.

05-24-2020, 08:38 PM	#5
retiredbiker Evangelist Posts: 454 Karma: 3886916 Join Date: May 2013 Location: Ontario, Canada Device: Kindle KB, Oasis, Pop_Os!, Kobo Forma	I'm currently working with an Author to produce several volumes, all of which will be formatted the same. It's very highly formatted stuff...verse, images, lots of quotations, attributions, and so on. Also using Writer with Linux. Two volumes done so far. So, perfect fit. I can't begin to describe all the hoops we've been through to get it right, but the basics are: Use Styles in Writer, and nothing but styles, except for the odd italic word. Make yourself a style template, and stick to it like glue. Look in LO help under "styles and templates" to learn how, it is not that hard. Definitely worth the trouble! Give the styles you create good names. The second and subsequent books MUST use the exact same styles or you haven't a hope. (We are doing both epub and print versions, so its even more important.) After the first book is just the way you want it in Writer, convert to epub. (Yes, saving to .docx is fine.) Then go into the editor, and correct or change anything you want. The conversion will probably not give a really tight well-coded book. Simplify the CSS. Give the styles meaningful names--but if you named them right in Writer, this should not be an issue. Get rid of any css classes you don't end up using. Then save (export) this css. When you do book 2, import it, replacing whatever the second conversion makes. Link it to all the files. Go through and make sure all the text is using exactly the same rules as the first book. If the styles in books one and 2 were identical in Writer, this will not be very hard. If you want a picture at the top of each page, for your epub to work best on a range of readers, each page should be its own html file. May not be practical, so "pagebreak" codes can be used. Not sure if they come across well or not in your conversion, they always give me trouble. No problem with all that in an epub, but the text will flow, so if your user chooses a nice huge font size, the "page" will be several screens. This doesn't begin to cover all the potential oop-es, but it is the core of our project. Last edited by retiredbiker; 05-24-2020 at 08:40 PM.