Book Creation Tutorials

[shen]

That's not the problem.
In Settings, "keep empty lines" can be checked, but upon closing the settings window, it's unchecked again.
Even when checked and I click on "reload file", empty lines aren't kept.
So this setting seems to be completely ingnored. Even on a fresh installation with the latest update

Stefan

[aheubert]

I'm new to the Sony reader, and new to this forum. Harry, thanks so much for your excellent tutorial. I have a question I hope you or others can answer for me. I have quite a few books nicely formatted as Word files that I'd like to upload to my reader. When I upload them directly, the reader does a very nice job of it in almost all respects, preserving leading, type sizes, justification, etc. (not the fonts themselves, but that's of less importance to me). The two things it doesn't do for me are

a) creating a nice table of contents with links on which I can click to get to each chapter; and

b) handling the footnotes.

I tried Book Designer, with the help of Harry's tutorial. It did solve a) and b) above. But it made me reformat so much of the book: putting in spurious titles, removing the page breaks, playing with the em dashes, and eliminating all the information about font size and leading.

Book Designer also had a problem I couldn't find a way around: Is there any way to get the body text to come out ragged right instead of justified? (The friend who will use the reader needs to read at a large font size, at which size the full justification often produces ugly spacing.)

What would be ideal would be to take my Word files (or HTML files, which Word can easily change them to), and just add some coding to create links for the footnotes and table of contents. Is there a way (perhaps indirect) to do that?

I saw in earlier posts that Canon has a program, no longer available for free, that's supposed to be the most full-featured one. Does anyone know whether it would address the needs I've described? If so, and if it isn't too expensive, I might spring for it.

Or would any of the other programs available be better for my purposes than Book Designer? I'm comfortable learning most any program, but only if it's well documented (which rules out those Sony programs that are mostly in Japanese).

I guess that was more than one question! Thanks very much for any suggestions any of you can offer.

[lanekko]

Originally Posted by aheubert

I'm new to the Sony reader, and new to this forum. Harry, thanks so much for your excellent tutorial. I have a question I hope you or others can answer for me. I have quite a few books nicely formatted as Word files that I'd like to upload to my reader. When I upload them directly, the reader does a very nice job of it in almost all respects, preserving leading, type sizes, justification, etc. (not the fonts themselves, but that's of less importance to me). The two things it doesn't do for me are

a) creating a nice table of contents with links on which I can click to get to each chapter; and

b) handling the footnotes.

I tried Book Designer, with the help of Harry's tutorial. It did solve a) and b) above. But it made me reformat so much of the book: putting in spurious titles, removing the page breaks, playing with the em dashes, and eliminating all the information about font size and leading.

Book Designer also had a problem I couldn't find a way around: Is there any way to get the body text to come out ragged right instead of justified? (The friend who will use the reader needs to read at a large font size, at which size the full justification often produces ugly spacing.)

What would be ideal would be to take my Word files (or HTML files, which Word can easily change them to), and just add some coding to create links for the footnotes and table of contents. Is there a way (perhaps indirect) to do that?

I saw in earlier posts that Canon has a program, no longer available for free, that's supposed to be the most full-featured one. Does anyone know whether it would address the needs I've described? If so, and if it isn't too expensive, I might spring for it.

Or would any of the other programs available be better for my purposes than Book Designer? I'm comfortable learning most any program, but only if it's well documented (which rules out those Sony programs that are mostly in Japanese).

I guess that was more than one question! Thanks very much for any suggestions any of you can offer.

I recommend Michelangelo. I've been using it for a while and does a great job as it is an add-in for Microsoft Word so you can use all the tools MS Word Offers for formatting your ebook in minutes for your reader. http://www.prs-500formatter.com/

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lanekko

I recommend Michelangelo. I've been using it for a while and does a great job as it is an add-in for Microsoft Word so you can use all the tools MS Word Offers for formatting your ebook in minutes for your reader. http://www.prs-500formatter.com/

I've tried that program and it turned out to be not nearly as useful as advertised.

[Patricia]

You can set the font and sizing with BD.
If you use the latest versions of Jon's Book Cleaner files (and set the language to German) then the emdashes come out fine too, (provided that you've clicked the option allowing them in the 'make sony reader book' screen).
I've found that if you centre and Bold the chapter titles in Word then BD will almost always recognise them.
The one thing that BD won't do is go for left justification only. It always seems to provide full justification.
If you don't want to experiment with BD any more, then you might try Kovid's libprs500.

[ponga163]

Harry,
I downloaded your very helpful file and followed it faithfully. The problem I have is that BD will not finish converting to lrf. I'm using BD version 5.0 with Vista. I'm trying to convert Jefferson Davis' "The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy" and Eusebius' "History of Constantine" from HTML to lrf. Any hints?

[lanekko]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've tried that program and it turned out to be the biggest load of crap ever written.

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lanekko

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment

You came here and praised this program all over the place. I did try it and posted the results. It didn't work well. This has nothing to do with not liking you. It has to do with this program not doing what it's claimed to do. The first example (from the website) even shows it did not put the paragraphs together as the author intended. I am not saying this based on an opinion with never having tried it. I did try it and it worked very poorly.

[vivaldirules]

I had to agree that your comment was less than useful, Jon, but I did a search and saw that you and others provided some usable info here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...t=michelangelo

It's too bad because I still suffer a lot with BD. My latest realization is that one should never select Reload Book unless you would like to start over and discard all the useful changes you have made to a book over the past hundred hours or so. Somehow I equated this with Open but of course it's not. I've lost two books and too many hours of work because of that. BD works, but it's just not been very friendly to me.

[JSWolf]

Michelangelo did not do anything all that wonderful. It did not find all the proper ends of paragraphs to put them back together again. It's an add-on for MS Word. I did take some PDF that I knew by looking where the paragraphs began and ended and yes, it worked in some cases, but not all and not enough to be worth the cost. When I used it to try to change the font size, it hung. Basically, it doesn't work as advertised and it can be made to hang.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by lanekko

No really, is a good program.. it's just that Jon aka JSWolf has something personal against me. You can tell by his "objective" comment

Can you please show us how well this program works with some screen caps please? I would like to see if maybe there is a newer version that might actually work. But when you do present the screen caps, can we also see screen caps of the original so we know it did work.

[JohnP]

The REAL issue for ALL of these conversion programs and scripts is how good is the source material. There are seven different formats for e-books: Word Documents (DOC), web brower (HTM), Microsoft Reader (LIT), Sony Reader (LRF), Adobe PDF (PDF), Rich Text (RTF), and finally Text (TXT). There is one for Palm but is almost never found. The 3 most common are LIT, PDF, and RTF. The best formatted books are invariably in LIT format unless THEY WERE CREATED by just quickly converting a TXT or RTF file. Then the LIT book will be badly formatted.
If the LIT book is in really good shape (such as the books available in the BAEN free library), then Book Designer is a snap. 10-15 minutes cleaning up the title and author and the title page, deleting empty lines, changing the parts of the book that were mislabled as titles and subtitles back to paragraphs, and deleting the chapter info at the bottom of the book is really all that needs to be done.
Then there is everything else! There are those crappy coverted LIT books with with lots of broken sentences and lots of empty lines. PDFs can be really bad and I have yet to see one that has worked by directly converting it to LRF by BD (usually the text is way too small). Text, Rich Text, HTM, and Word Docs all seem to have to be put into Word and handcrafted and/or macroed to death before they will look halfway decent when converted to LRF.
So when you decide to convert a book, consider the source FIRST. Is this book available in different formats? Which looks best? Use the best formatted source! If none of them are well formatted, no magic wand is going to do this for you! You now have to consider it a work of love and craftmanship and not a quick and dirty way of getting a free book into your Sony Reader.
E-books are the future, folks. Make no bones about it. Hard plastic CDs are quickly being replaced by digital copies. Cameras just flipped over to 50% digital. Movies will be next. As books are the oldest form of communication and entertainment (except for the play), they are well entrenched. But ALL books put to the Library of Congress today HAVE to also be submitted digitally. Amazon, Google, many other private firms, and the US government are all trying to digitize all books that were ever published. Once automated page flippers and decent OCR programs and thousands of selfless proofreaders come together, books will all be digitized. Then the weight of publishers will DEMAND e-book readers. It WILL happen.
We are part of the inovation wedge, the first users. We deal with constantly changing standards, technology, and formats. Keep your cool and look pitingly on the poor smuck with a hardcover copy of War and Peace propped up on his belly.

[JSWolf]

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

Likewise for Mobi. Just use "ConvertLit" to "explode" the LIT to OEB. Double click the "opf" package file to load into MobiPocket Creator, then click the "Build" button to build the book. Takes about 1 minute flat.

[JohnP]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why take 10-15 min? If the MS Reader file is well made, then lit2lrf will do the conversion in almost no time.

Well, if I had KNOWN about lit2lrf, I certianly would had tried it out! I am sure it is well documented in these forums but so is a ton of other great stuff. Coming into the whole field of book conversion cold, I have a hard time picking up on the gems. Like the french cook in "The little Mermaid" siad "Zut Alor! I have meesed one!"
I will check it out. Thanks!