Apple pages Creating Page breaks

[ralphiedee]

I have to do an E Pub out of a word doc, I used the Epub Best practices template. This is a two part question but first is I notice that I have create dozens of test pages to make sure the document is corruptly formatted when looking at the epub in IPad or iPhone. If you look at the screenshot below you will see that I have to have chapter titles begin on their own page and this is not always the case using this template as I have the invisibles set to show but this does not seem to matter as the number of breaks in each page is different . So at this pace I'm lucky I have a 10 page book, how the heck would I format a 100 page book using the template?


Next part, if I crack open my exported e pub files I see that looking at the xhtml files I can see which text has to be moved and added to a different page in order for the chapters to line up with the title of each chapter at the top of each page now this may sound stupid but is that the correct way to format an epub file ? if so once I edit the xhtml what do I do to view the changes in epub????


screenshot of what I need to do in attached

[pholy]

I notice that I have create dozens of test pages to make sure the document is corruptly formatted

Hmmm, most people have no trouble at all with creating a corruptly formatted epub file... j/k

Seriously though, I think the only way to make sure that chapters begin with a new screen is to put each chapter in a separate file. The epub editing tool Sigil can, I believe, do that for you, and lots of other neat things. It's worth learning about, and has its own forum here on MR. My way is to copy and paste each chapter into a new xhtml file; but I'm old fashioned; it makes it really easy to get a corruptly formatted file Do as I say, not as I do!

Also, I get the impression - I may be wrong - that you are not familiar with reflowable documents in general and epub formats in particular. If that is so, I recommend poking about in the MR wiki, specifically the topics on ebook and epub creatation. I found them to be a good starting point when I was working on my first books.

[ralphiedee]

Thanks for the reply, I know html and have worked in xhtmlplenty of times so I'm good there. As I see from your reply that the answer to this is actually not going nuts inside Pages but to edit the actual chapter .xhtml files which I can do as I looked inside those already and see what and where the errors have to me moved. With that said NOW, I need to know once I edit the xhtml what do I do to view the changes in epub as in order to go inside the epub file I have to convert the file to a zip than extract the files. Once I edit those files how do I view the new files?

thanks

RD

[pholy]

You have to re-zip the files, of course - but it's not so simple as that
The mimetype file must be first, and it must be uncompressed. With Linux, I use a two step process:

zip book-file.epub -DX0 mimetype
zip book-file.epub -rDX9 *

Linux zip does not require the .zip extension, and I'm obviously using the command line. For the Mac, pdurrant has written a script that does all the right stuff. I'm not sure how the Windows version of zip differs from the Linux version. Perhaps someone else can jump in on that aspect.

[ralphiedee]

Thx for that info but no need for me to do that now as I did what took me a real long time to figure out in Pages only minutes in Sigil.

thx

RD