Book Designer - I'm a Convert!

[vvv]

Originally Posted by NatCh

Do you know of any way to check that?

BD -> Make eBooks -> Sony Reader -> styles -> external fonts -> add -> choose a font -> add font. If the chosen font can be embedded, it will appear in "external fonts" list, otherwise the error message will be shown.

[Antonio]

So, an books created by those of you on this thread that you can share with us all in the brand spankin' new Reader Uploads section?

[UncleDuke]

Originally Posted by RWood

OK, first I have enclosed a screen shot of the embed property area. The top box is what is allowed with this font and the bottom box is a description of all possible descriptions in the top box.

Now about setting a base font in BD. Open BD and select Make e-book|Sony Reader. On the top are three (3) tabs, select "styles" and you will see the settings for each element in BD for Sony Reader. This is also where you can add external fonts to the BD arena. I save my selections under "default" so that they will load each time without my having to think about it.

As for listening and calling people by the form of address they request ....

It works but most of the fonts all say I can't do anything. Bummerusky.

[NatCh]

Well, it took me a bit longer to be convinced, but you lot love BD so much I kept trying it. I like the idea of smaller files and especially in-line pix, so I kept trying it. I kept running into stumbling blocks, but I also liked a lot of what I was seeing, so I kept trying it.

Finally, I've gotten around the peculiarities enough, and figured out how to set (and save) my preferences enough that I'm sold. I just did 2 books, with cover art and other in-line pix (like maps) in about 10 minutes. No fuss, no muss. Granted it took me about 20 hours of trying to get here, but here I am.

I finally realized I was trying too hard, I didn't like the way it handled 'titles' and 'subtitles' in the headers & footers, so I spent a lot of time trying to deal with getting the right stuff to display (for instance, David Weber likes to use "* * *" to mark jumps between story lines, and it wanted to treat them like titles, and put that text in the footer), I finally realized that I don't like the header & footer in the first place, and turned them off. Problem solved.

For most books (now that I have the prefs set the way I want, and know what to ignore), the biggest time consumer is loading up the cover art.

It took me longer to get here than a lot of you folks, but I'm glad I made the trip!

Now I'll be converting things as I re-read/acquire them and zipping up the RTFs for archive purposes.

Happy happy, joy joy!

[HarryT]

Hallelujah, you've seen the light. Welcome, brother .

You're right, though. If you try and "fight" BD it's a lost cause; you have to set it up the way you want it and then just let it do its own thing.

My basic procedure is:

1. Load the book.
2. Select "Tools/Element Browser" and find all the titles. If there's anything that shouldn't be a title (BD is a bit keen on changing any single word on a line into a title!), change it back to "Paragraph". It's the "Title" styles that end up in the TOC.
3. If the book doesn't have one, add a nice cover page and table of contents (I like to have a table of contents at the start of the actual text, as well as the Reader TOC).
4. Make sure BD has gone the styles right for the author and title (it more than not gets them back to front - there's a button to swap them around)
4. Generate the book.

My standard settings are:

Language: German (this gets you all the accented characters - if you use English, they get changed to Russian characters!).
Page margins: 10px all round
Book elements: Author from last name
Headers/Footers: Header off, footer on
Skip cover page and title page (I prefer to do my own)
Page breaks: on
User page breaks: on

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by NatCh

I finally realized I was trying too hard, I didn't like the way it handled 'titles' and 'subtitles' in the headers & footers, so I spent a lot of time trying to deal with getting the right stuff to display (for instance, David Weber likes to use "* * *" to mark jumps between story lines, and it wanted to treat them like titles, and put that text in the footer), I finally realized that I don't like the header & footer in the first place, and turned them off. Problem solved.

Hi Nat,

As you say, BD has a habit of treating any word that's on a line by itself (such as "* * *") as a title, which has three undesirable effects:

1. It forces a page break at that point, if you have "page breaks" enabled in the options (which is a good idea, but not for this!).

2. It appears in the TOC, which is very undesirable.

3. If you have footers enabled (as I do), it'll appear in the footer.

There's a very easy to find and fix all these. Simply select "Tools/Element Browser", make sure "Titles" is selected, and click the "Find" button. You'll get a list of everything that's been given the "Title" style and you can instantly see what shouldn't be one. If you click on something in the list, BD will take you to it, and will highlight the text. If it shouldn't be a title, simply select the "Paragraph" style for it and then if you still want it to appear "centred" (as for your "* * *", for example), select "Format/More Transformations/Align: center" to centre it.

It's a good idea to at least get the "Title" style right because they are what form the TOC, and having a TOC without garbage in it is useful. It also means that you can usefully switch on footers, and get chapter names at the bottom of the page, which personally I find very useful (having the book name in a header just seems like a complete waste of space - I know what book I'm reading!).

Hope that's of some help to you. "Element Browser" is one of BD's many "hidden treasures" which make it so much easier to use!

[NatCh]

Originally Posted by HarryT

4. Make sure BD has gone the styles right for the author and title (it more than not gets them back to front - there's a button to swap them around)

I ... it ... you mean ... it does?!?! Gotta find that button -- I been switching them by hand.

I don't care about the TOC or the footers, so I just go through the list of titles and subtitles in the element browser to make sure the "one word sentences" aren't getting bolded and centered.

I do wish the centering wasn't buried so deeply (a button for alignment would be nice, even if it just stepped through the options).

Otherwise, I'm quite pleased with the results I'm getting, now that I've figured out how to get out of its way enough.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by NatCh

I ... it ... you mean ... it does?!?! Gotta find that button -- I been switching them by hand.

I don't care about the TOC or the footers, so I just go through the list of titles and subtitles in the element browser to make sure the "one word sentences" aren't getting bolded and centered.

I do wish the centering wasn't buried so deeply (a button for alignment would be nice, even if it just stepped through the options).

Otherwise, I'm quite pleased with the results I'm getting, now that I've figured out how to get out of its way enough.

The "Swap author and title" button is on the "Corrector" tool palette (the one with all the style names on). It's the 5th button down in the left-most column.

Totally agree with you along the alignment menu - I wish they had buttons!

[NatCh]

Ah, yes, now I see it. And I looked through all those buttons too -- guess it just didn't 'take.'

[FangornUK]

Just one tip when doing changes, when the dialog comes up to ask you to "save the changes" just before creating an LRF, select YES. I've always said NO as I assumed it was writing back to my source file which I didn't want - so I've been cursing Book Designer for not applying my changes to the LRF in the past.

[igorsk]

You can also use the button "Shift" in the Make Sony Reader File dialog.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by FangornUK

Just one tip when doing changes, when the dialog comes up to ask you to "save the changes" just before creating an LRF, select YES. I've always said NO as I assumed it was writing back to my source file which I didn't want - so I've been cursing Book Designer for not applying my changes to the LRF in the past.

I have it set to "Save without prompting", simply because I can't think of any circumstances in which I'd want to create an LRF without saving!

[RWood]

Harry: How do you make those master and section TOCs? They look great and work well. They seem like just the thing I might need for a project I'm doing.

[HarryT]

Using the "Notes and Links" feature of BD, which are very easy to use. A "note" is a place that you want to jump to, a link is a place (perhaps more than one) that you want to jump to the note from.

Go to the "Edit" menu and select "Notes and Links". You get a dialog box - the left column shows the notes, the right column the links for the selected note.

Now, all you have to do is select each chapter title (or wherever else you want to jump to) in turn (this is very easy using the "Element Browser"), highlight the text, and click the "Add" button under the left column of the "Notes and Links" dialog. The text appears in the column as a "note", with its page number alongside it. Add all the notes you'll want in your TOC.

Then, what I do is manually type in my table of contents (or book index, or whatever), and then highlight the text of a line in the table of contents, select the note that I want it to "jump" to in the left column of the "Notes and Links" dialog, and click the "Add" button under the right column. This adds the selected text as a "link" to the chosen note. In Reader, the line in the TOC will now appear as a "hyperlink" and, when you select it, you'll jump to the chapter title it links to. It's a two-way link, in fact - click the chapter title link and you end up back at the table of contents.

This is a great facility - it's a general hyperlink system that you can use to do tables of contents, footnotes, endnotes, general "references" from one part of your book to another - really its uses are limited only by your imagination.

This probably sounds rather complicated, but it isn't! The best thing to do is to experiment with it and see how it works - the key thing to remember is that you add the places you want to jump TO in the left hand column, select each one in turn, and add the text that you want to link to it using the right hand column.

That's probably horribly confused - it's a lot easier to do it than it is to try and describe it .

[RWood]

Thans Harry.