PRS-350 what format for my recipes?

[entropy]

I think it's likely this question is in the wrong place, but I am not sure where to put it...

I plan to buy a Sony PRS-350. One application I am excited about is a simple and portable way to store my cooking recipes. Many of them are .txt files, but some are handwritten on index cards.

With my scanner I could easily create .pdf files of the handwritten recipes. Or I could type them up as .txt (or Word) files.

What do you recommend? I have heard of Calibre - should I be transforming them through that somehow?

Any and all advice appreciated. Thanks!

[SeaBookGuy]

Welcome, entropy! You have asked in the correct place.

I would say using Calibre to convert the TXT's to EPUB would work best. Be sure to select a nice cover picture as otherwise the device will assign the text page of the recipe as the thumbnail image, which is kind of yukky looking - LOL!

PDF'ing is not recommended.

[entropy]

That is super-helpful SeaBookGuy! I will type them into .txt files. Thanks!

Should I put them all together as one "book" in Calibre do you think? My own little cookbook? Or each a separate file? What is best for searching/using the end product?

[SeaBookGuy]

How many are we talking about? If it's going to be more than just a few than yes a book would be best. If it's really a lot of them, you might have to learn how to format a Table of Contents! In that case, I'd probably narrow it down a bit and have separate smaller 'books' for items (chicken, desserts, etc.) perhaps?

I haven't used the search feature very often, but I'm sure there are others who will chime in on that, as well as other suggestions for fine-tuning your project.

[entropy]

Probably 100 recipes... different "books" for different types of food is a great idea.

I'd love to hear input about how searching works because that will be important.

[Asawi]

I'm very new to playing around with eBook formats, but when I wanted to make a Boston shopping guide for my daughter I researched a bit, and what I did was use OpenOffice (free Office suite) and a plugin that converted the text to ePub and make a much better layout that my initial TXT. I haven't played around much with, but my initial impression is good.

[entropy]

Thanks for the idea, Asa... will have a look at OpenOffice. Any formatting is better than TXT!

[doreenjoy]

Take a look at the Atlantis word processor. It's a Word-like application. If you buy the $30 version, you can create EPUBs from any document, with lovely formatting.

[kartu]

You could keep it in any document type format (be it Microsoft Office, or Open Office) on your PC and print it to PDF (there are free "PDF" printers out there as well, not sure if Open Office supports it out of the box) using A6 as page format.

I fail to see any reason to use EPUB in your case. If someone else would like to resize the page, "reflow" would work just fine.

[Rizla]

Personally I would probably not use .txt because it cannot handle font functionality (bold, underline, varying sizes) which are handy for titles, etc.

I think Calibre can convert .rtf files to epub. Rtf means rich text format and you can save as rtf using any word processor.

By the way, I second that Atlantis is an excellent word processor, not that you need it IMO.

[deadgloves]

Yeah, I would go with epub and use something like open office or atlantis to create the document. Calibre is great but it won't be able to read chapters from a rtf document. There are a couple of open office epub extensions this one: http://extensions.services.openoffic...ct/Writer2ePub can do a table of contents by using open office styles to set each recipe header as a 'heading 1' style.

[entropy]

Thanks for all the great thoughts and ideas.

My plan of action is...
type up the 20 or so recipes that are not already electronic
create a table of contents using the Open Office extension deadgloves recommended
make it into an epub file

Will keep Atlantis in mind if I think of other projects like this.

Thanks again for all your help, and I will report back.

[elemenoP]

Hmmm, but if you did each recipe as a document, then you could use Calibre to tag each one in multiple ways, such as "vegetarian, appetizer, low-fat" etc. Then on your Sony you would have a collection of vegetarian recipes, a collection of appetizers, a collection of low-fat recipes. I think that would be great. But I know the Sony starts to slow down after too many documents... I don't know how many that is, maybe someone else can weigh in on that.

eP

[SeaBookGuy]

Not a bad idea in theory, but as the Sony doesn't have folders, wouldn't the all those individual recipes get mixed in with the actual books (at the same root level)?

[delphin]

Originally Posted by entropy

Thanks for all the great thoughts and ideas.

My plan of action is...
type up the 20 or so recipes that are not already electronic
create a table of contents using the Open Office extension deadgloves recommended
make it into an epub file

Will keep Atlantis in mind if I think of other projects like this.

Thanks again for all your help, and I will report back.

Open Office is the way to go.

Once you figure out how to use 'header 1', 'header 2', etc to create your chapter headings so that Open Office will auto-convert them into a valid TOC when you export the document, everything should be fine.

EPUB should work nicely, but it can be a little complicated to get the formatting and TOC to work the way you expect.

Another more 'what you see is what you get' option would be to use PDF format.

PDF gets blasted around here because material formated for full sized 8 1/2 x 11 pages doesn't look good squeezed onto a tiny 4 inch screen (Duhhh ) but if you format it appropriately to match your small screen it will work very nicely indeed. That's why Sony ships the PRS-350 with a PDF formatted user manual.

Open Office will let you export directly to PDF right out of the box, and if you select the export option to export 'bookmarks', your TOC and other hyper-links are preserved in the PDF perfectly.

The main thing to remember as you format PDF pages for the 350 is to -

USE REALLY BIG FONTS

Or alternately, you can change your page size setting in OpenOffice to a smaller size (say 3 3/4 x 5 inches instead of 8 1/2 x 11) which will also make the fonts look bigger by changing the page size in the PDF so the PRS-350 doesn't have to scale it down so much.

Another tricky thing is to get the PDF to show up with the correct title and author tags as you want them to in your main book listings on the Sony.

When you export the PDF, the 'creator' (author) tags should get set based on the "First Name" and "Last Name" USER DATA info you have set in the OpenOffice options menu, and the internal PDF document 'title' tag gets set based on the title set for the document individually by opening and editing the document "Properties" from the "File" menu in OpenOffice.

EPUB's are also a good format, and if you do choose to go that route you can either use the OpenOffice optional EPUB export plugin, or for more flexibility in the final formatting, you can save the document as an HTML 'Web Document' and them import it into the free Sigil EPUB editor for final layout and conversion to EPUB.

In general EPUB format is better when we want the be able to easily change font sizes from the PRS-350 while reading. This works best with simple text prose without complex formatting.

If you want to control exact formatting on each page and control exactly where page breaks occur then PDF is best (for example, to create a nicely formatted table to list your recipes ingredients and make sure that it is not split across two pages.)

PDF's also have the advantage that you could, if you wanted, email them to a friend, and they will open up in Adobe Acrobat on any PC.

Also, if you are reasonably careful about using clean simple formatting, the PDFs you create will work on virtually all other portable ebook readers, including normally incompatible devices like Nooks, Kindles, as well as your Sony (EPUB doesn't work on Kindles, but PDF will).