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BobC · 10-17-2009, 12:57 PM

I convert most of my books to FB2 as my experience is that on the BeBook that format provides the best display. In addition the Table of Contents for the book is automatically generated by the reader and using it is much simpler than, say, the Mobipocket, approach..

Most of the time I have used Book Designer 5 to build the books however there are a couple of shortcomings that you need to be aware of when using it. The most frequent problem is that it does not correctly handle the ampersand character (&) which it halfheartedly renders as " amp; " (instead of the HTML entity " & "). No amount of playing around with BD5 seems to overcome this so I now post-process the resultant fb2 output file to correct the problem, changing instances of amp; to & using a text editor. You do have to be careful if doing this that you don't change words like "lamp" followed by a semi-colon to l& so include a leading space before the search and replace string. There is a slight possibility that you could be caught out by a phrase in a document about electrical matters where amp is used as a common shortform for ampere and is immediately followed by a semi-colon but I suspect documents including this would be rare.

The more problematic issue with Book Designer, however, is its inability to generate the correct fb2 code for tables. If you have a book where the display of a table is essential then trying to hack the output with a text editor, while possible, is messy. In fact other fb2 tools seem to also suffer from table-blindness. This is where OpenOffice can come to the rescue. The OpenOfficeOrg add-on OOOFBTools will produce tables that CoolReader (but not FBReader) will render sensibly. OOOFBTools can take a bit of getting used to as all the documentation is in Russian, however a little experimentation and practice will pay dividends. The important thing to remember is that if you want something to appear as a fb2 Title (and thus appear in the automatically generated TOC) then you need to use the style "level 1" (or level 2 etc) not the Title style

BobC

10-17-2009, 12:57 PM	#17
BobC Guru Posts: 691 Karma: 3026110 Join Date: Dec 2008 Location: Lancashire, U.K. Device: BeBook 1, BeBook Pure, Kobo Glo, (and HD),Energy Sistem EReader Pro +	I convert most of my books to FB2 as my experience is that on the BeBook that format provides the best display. In addition the Table of Contents for the book is automatically generated by the reader and using it is much simpler than, say, the Mobipocket, approach.. Most of the time I have used Book Designer 5 to build the books however there are a couple of shortcomings that you need to be aware of when using it. The most frequent problem is that it does not correctly handle the ampersand character (&) which it halfheartedly renders as " amp; " (instead of the HTML entity " & "). No amount of playing around with BD5 seems to overcome this so I now post-process the resultant fb2 output file to correct the problem, changing instances of amp; to & using a text editor. You do have to be careful if doing this that you don't change words like "lamp" followed by a semi-colon to l& so include a leading space before the search and replace string. There is a slight possibility that you could be caught out by a phrase in a document about electrical matters where amp is used as a common shortform for ampere and is immediately followed by a semi-colon but I suspect documents including this would be rare. The more problematic issue with Book Designer, however, is its inability to generate the correct fb2 code for tables. If you have a book where the display of a table is essential then trying to hack the output with a text editor, while possible, is messy. In fact other fb2 tools seem to also suffer from table-blindness. This is where OpenOffice can come to the rescue. The OpenOfficeOrg add-on OOOFBTools will produce tables that CoolReader (but not FBReader) will render sensibly. OOOFBTools can take a bit of getting used to as all the documentation is in Russian, however a little experimentation and practice will pay dividends. The important thing to remember is that if you want something to appear as a fb2 Title (and thus appear in the automatically generated TOC) then you need to use the style "level 1" (or level 2 etc) not the Title style BobC