Help Needed Creating Magazine

[alblurt06]

I am developing an E-book version of my school's alumni magazine, and needed some help.

I was looking over other Magazines, such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Since both magazines are DRM-protected, reverse engineering them would take a lot of effort and work, not to mention potential legal pit falls. What I was most interested out of all their work was:

1. How they put together their magazine. What programs did they use?

2. How they added the footer to their magazine. I want to have links at the bottom of my own magazine so that readers can jump from article to article instead of going one page forward and backward every time.

For now, I am using Microsoft Word 2007 to create the drafts. I was wondering if anything better existed, that I could use. Is Microsoft Publisher any good? Adobe InDesign? Any help would be appreciated, as I have been working on this awhile, and would like to finish it once and for all. Thanks for your help in advance.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by alblurt06

I am developing an E-book version of my school's alumni magazine, and needed some help.

I was looking over other Magazines, such as The Atlantic and The New Yorker. Since both magazines are DRM-protected, reverse engineering them would take a lot of effort and work, not to mention potential legal pit falls. What I was most interested out of all their work was:

1. How they put together their magazine. What programs did they use?

2. How they added the footer to their magazine. I want to have links at the bottom of my own magazine so that readers can jump from article to article instead of going one page forward and backward every time.

For now, I am using Microsoft Word 2007 to create the drafts. I was wondering if anything better existed, that I could use. Is Microsoft Publisher any good? Adobe InDesign? Any help would be appreciated, as I have been working on this awhile, and would like to finish it once and for all. Thanks for your help in advance.

I can't speak for the big publishers, but I and several other people here use Mobipocket Creator.

You say that you use Word 2007. If possible, I'd go back from the single file draft to the individual articles, each in their own file. I'd save the files in html. I like to edit the raw html+css becuase it give me the best control over the output.

The reason I recommended separate files is that I want you to also make a master copy of the title page, copyright page and the other front matter of the magazine. These pages don't change that much from month to month, and having the master will save work. While you are at it, you might want to make a master contents page. Mobipocket Creator can generate one for you automatically, but it won't look as nice as one made by hand.

[alblurt06]

Originally Posted by Nate the great

I can't speak for the big publishers, but I and several other people here use Mobipocket Creator.

You say that you use Word 2007. If possible, I'd go back from the single file draft to the individual articles, each in their own file. I'd save the files in html. I like to edit the raw html+css becuase it give me the best control over the output.

The reason I recommended separate files is that I want you to also make a master copy of the title page, copyright page and the other front matter of the magazine. These pages don't change that much from month to month, and having the master will save work. While you are at it, you might want to make a master contents page. Mobipocket Creator can generate one for you automatically, but it won't look as nice as one made by hand.

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I have downloaded Mobipocket Creator as well, after finding that it was directly tied to the Amazon Kindle. I have also used Mobipocket to upload my files into the kindle, and for the most part, my file looks fine -- so far, its just everything for the magazine funneled into one big article.

So basically your suggestions are:

Separate all of what I need into multiple files. For example, the TOC, Title Page, Letter from the Editor and everything else go in their own files?

If this is the case, how does one link the TOC? Like when I import my file into Mobipocket and then import into the Kindle, I notice that I can scroll down and click on links to the article. With all the documents separated, how does this work?


Also -- if I want to have a footer link at the bottom of the page linking me to the next article, how does that work?

Thanks again.

[Nate the great]

Originally Posted by alblurt06

Hi,

Thank you for your reply.

I have downloaded Mobipocket Creator as well, after finding that it was directly tied to the Amazon Kindle. I have also used Mobipocket to upload my files into the kindle, and for the most part, my file looks fine -- so far, its just everything for the magazine funneled into one big article.

I've never heard that before.

As for "one big article", I assume that you want each article, letters, etc to look like its starting a new page (at the top of the screen)? You can do that by inserting a page break tag like:

<div style="page-break-before:always"/>

Originally Posted by alblurt06

If this is the case, how does one link the TOC? Like when I import my file into Mobipocket and then import into the Kindle, I notice that I can scroll down and click on links to the article. With all the documents separated, how does this work?

Opening the TOC in a text editor and editing the html by hand can give you the best result. But, MobiCreator can also generate the TOC automatically if you tell it the what to html tags and attributes to link to. For example, you could have all of the section titles in h3 tags. All you'd need to do is tell MobiCreator the tag.

Originally Posted by alblurt06

Also -- if I want to have a footer link at the bottom of the page linking me to the next article, how does that work?

I don't think you'll need this. The articles will be in the same order as the TOC, yes? All the reader will need to do is click the next page button. But if you want a link back the the TOC, then just use a standard html <a href> tag.