Here's what I hope to accomplish, here's how I've gone about it so far, and here are the problems I've faced.
1) HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH
I have a JPEG cover and the full text for my novel
The Hungarian Game (an international best-selling espionage thriller some 38 years ago), which I want to convert to an eBook. There are a few, very simple bits of formatting criteria that must be applied to the text. First: That almost all paragraphs throughout have their first lines indented, and there is no extra leading between paragraphs. Then: On just a few
select paragraphs throughout, I need that extra line of leading - and a flush left first line - to indicate a fresh scene.
2) HOW I'VE GONE ABOUT THIS
I've opened the RTF text in Open Office and saved as an Open Office (*.ODT) file. This seems to be the preferred format for the two eBook converters that I've used.
Although I first tried a program called "Jutoh" to make the conversion, Jutoh seems to be in the pre-beta-testing development stage, and there's no finished manual for it. I was able to communicate with the program's developer, but after a few weeks of futile attempts I erased the whole mess from my computer and wrote off the cost of the program.
Now I'm trying the combination of calibre and Sigil.
Although calibre quickly and easily imported the cover and ODT text, and exported into *mobi and *.epub formats, the text wasn't what I wanted. Despite that I properly formatted the text in Open Office, and that the formatting showed in the resulting *.odt file, calibre would export the file to *epub/*mobi either with all text using inter-paragraph leading, or with all text showing per-paragraph indents but none of the inter-paragraph leading that was in the original.
3) PROBLEMS
I'm accustomed to using Adobe products - GoLive (web authoring), InDesign (desktop publishing), Illustrator, Photoshop, and Acrobat Professional. In each of these programs text editing is really quite easy. In GoLive in particular I've never had a problem re-writing the raw HTML code.
With calibre, however, when I highlight the appropriate Title, click on "Edit metadata" and choose "Edit medadata individually," the book cover appears -
but there's no text field! The calibre manual suggests that I can edit the Cascading Style Sheets and specific HTML code for the text, but I don't see how this can be done without the text.
Hello?
After banging my head against the monitor for an hour or two, I threw in the towel and did what calibre's manual suggested: I exported the results as an ePub and opened the ePub in Sigil for text editing.
But, though I can see both cover and text of the resulting ePub in a viewer, in Sigil I see only the cover. As in calibre,
no text! And no indication of how to view text in Sigil's manual.
Wonderful!
Does anyone have an idea of how I can view/format text in either calibre or Sigil?
Alternatively, does anyone know of a reliable,
fully-tested (post-beta and de-bugged) commercial ePub editor/converter that has a complete PDF manual - and the professional attributes of Adobe programs - and will let me view, edit, and format text prior to conversion? My finished output will be in *.mobi format for Kindle publication.
Thanks