Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Word or LibreOffice are good for creating the source text. But, you HAVE to use styles instead of highlight the text and hit a button on the toolbar.
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I use LibreOffice and do use styles, although I sometimes will do direct formatting when it is something that is a one-off in a document. I used to dislike styles when I was using MS-Word but I've grown to like them when I started using OfficeOffice.org (continued with LibreOffice) due to the control it gives me over my documents and the ability to easily make consistent document-wide changes.
Although it takes a few minutes at the beginning it saves a great amount of time in the long run. It also allows for consistent formatting, and also makes it easy to change the formatting document-wide if desired.
As an example, I normally put a blank line between my paragraphs with no first-line indent because it's easier for me to read and it's what I'm used to, and I can also make small adjustments in the space after each paragraph (10 points instead of 12 points). However, if I decide to change it to first-line indents with no blank lines between the paragraphs all it takes is making two adjustments in the Body Text Style (0 points after each paragraph, indent the first line of each paragraph 0.5 inches).
I'm sure this can be done in MS-Word, but with LibreOffice when I set the size of the page to the same as my Nook Glowlight 4 when I'm in Normal View I can see precisely what the ebook will look like on my ereader when I save it as a PDF. Using Styles I can make sure that all of my self-created ebooks look the same on my ereader, and correct any formatting issues (such as a badly split paragraph between pages).
One thing I'm looking into is page styles to see if I can set up a page style in a templet that will automatically apply to all documents attached to that template (when I open up a document it will automatically update to reflect the formatting changes in the template). Then all I'd have to do is change the page size for my new ereader in the template and all of the ebooks attached to that templet will automatically update rather than having to do each ebook individually.