Eclipse wrote as part of a post:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Eclipse
Or am I missing some magic tricks in MS-Office or Open Office that takes a text and make a "clever" thing with it, or a way to do batch-like jobs on paragraphs and objects? As you can tell, I'm not a word-processing guru ;-)
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When using StarOffice/OpenOffice.org to make PDF ebooks, I've found that using paragraph styles is the key to easy and consistent ebook formatting. It also makes it easy to achieve formatting that would be a great deal of work to do manually.
What styles basically do is allow you to indirectly format your text by applying a style to it, rather than by directly formatting the text (where you mark the text and then format it). Any text marked with a style will reflect the formatting contained in the style. If you change the style, the text marked with the style throughout your document will be updated to reflect the change.
To provide an illustration, when I make an ebook I use paragraph styles to do the following formatting:
- Set the Main Body style to Georgia 14pt with 12 points of space after the paragraph, no first-line indent, and widow & orphen protection (no paragraph of less than five lines is split between two pages).
- Set the chapter headings to Calibri 24pt, center the text, and insert a page break before all of the chapter headings.
- Set the chapter subheadings to Calibri 20pt, center the text, and ensure that the entire chapter subheading stays with the chapter heading.
- Set the text for documents (such as letters and diary entries written by the characters within the story) to Cumberland (a typeface similar to Courier) 14pt, indent the text 0.5 inches on both sides, and surround all of the paragraphs with a thin border (to simulate the edges of paper).
It is possible to do all of the above by manually formatting the paragraphs, but it would be much more work. But the real power of styles comes when you want to make mass changes to your ebooks. In the above example, if I wanted to change the font in the main body to Times New Roman all if have to do is change the font in the Main Body style and all paragraphs marked with that style will reflect the font change.
I hope this helps.