[The Straven]

Countless hours of lurking here at mobileread include many spent sifting Workshop for tips from the mechanics here. I feel confident enough to post my own work, now, for two purposes:

Firstly, I hope that you all can give me good advice on how to improve my work,
and
secondly, I hope that someone just starting out as I did not long ago might find this a useful example.

The ODT files in the attached ZIP were generated using OpenOffice.org 3.1 from text taken from the Project Guteberg edition of de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (part 1). I used the 1904 edition found on Google Books as a guide. The first file is with real footnotes while the second includes the footnotes in the text body. I elected to remove the disclaimer due to editing and re-formatting (if I've misunderstood the fine print, someone please let me know). I've chosen to use size A5 in order to create good PDFs for the iLiad (and quite possibly the DR800), but with a good amount of work I believe these can be used to generate PDFs for any liseuse. It took a solid day's work to work the files into this condition. I confess that I don't know at all how to convert them to EPUB.

I've used footers instead of headers because I think the chapter title pages are ugly with them and it doesn't look like there's a way to switch page styles without a break. Any suggestions? How is my use of styles? I'd like to see opinions on spacing or no spacing above/below paragraphs (see Header 3 no-outline style). But again, any constructive criticism is welcome.

Update, May 16, 2010:
I had to walk away and let this stew -- but I didn't know it would have to stew so long!

The problem was that I had three styles for chapter headings: the chapter number, the chapter title, and a shortened title in some instances where the title was very long. Organizationally this was messy, but I couldn't figure out how to consolidate them and have the footers (and now also the table of contents) appear nice. My solution is to set the chapter number and title in the "Heading 3" style as such: "[sp][sp][sp]Chapter I[sp][sp][sp][line break][line break]THE[sp]EXTERIOR[sp]FORM[sp]OF[sp]NORTH[sp]AMERICA" where "Chapter I" is set to 22pt and the rest is set to 11pt; the spaces before and after "Chapter I" keep that line centered on the page. In the case of very long titles, I added a shortened title and set those in the "Heading 3" style as such: "[sp][sp][sp]Chapter II[sp][sp][sp][line break]ORIGIN[sp]OF[sp]THE[sp]ANGLO-AMERICANS", setting the shortened title to a font color=white. An indent of -0.10" in the footer and the TOC keeps this presentable.

Other tweaks:
- renamed the page styles to "A5 No Footer" and "A5 Book Body" in order to make them easier to find
- added a TOC using cross-references for quick navigation
- added "[CONTENTS]" to the left-page footer to allow quick return to the TOC, again using the cross-reference
- Replaced most double carriage returns by adding spacing into styles; a regex search for "^^" found every instance
- Switched the font to Constantia (I'd like to use Garamond, if I can find it) and reduced the text body font size to 11pt by editing styles
- lightened the background color on the footnote style to make it easier to read (and the color can be easily removed the same way)
- reduced the first tab of the footer style to 0.28"

I might update the version with the footnotes set in-text if I have time, but I doubt that I will.