The design of the book is breaking!

[Quoth]

It's like the old joke of tourist in Dublin looking for a hotel. The tourist gets a very long explanation and then the Garda (Irish Policeman) ends with, "But I wouldn't start from here."

Yes it a lot of work, but if you have chapters, then set next style for the heading style to be "default body text", copy & past heading, set to Chapter style, hit enter, and then copy paste all the source body text for that chapter to that line (in Unformatted paste mode so current style is used).

A 120K word novel takes less than an hour.

Also learn how to save your styles as a template in LO Writer or Word. I have three templates for three format/styles of epub and also each of those a more complex set of styles for PDF. If the template for the epub and the template for the PDF version use the same names, then copy & paste of entire document works, but the properties of the destination styles are used. Then all I have to do is change the page style applied to each section (as PDFs use many and ebooks only one)

I'm using Calibre 6.9 on Linux Mint 21.2 with Mate Desktop. As an experiment I copied a about 82K word docx to XP with Calibre 1.48 and converted to epub the system TOC and content looked fine in the Viewer.

I used Word till about 2014 then LO Writer on Windows, then Linux full time since Jan 2017 (Though I was using Linux part time in 1998).

I discovered to my own cost in time the problem of typing text into a Desktop Publishing program (which InDesign is). Even before Word or Open Office progressed to being good, I discovered that even if using DTP it was better to edit in ANY wordprocessor and re-import to DTP. I've not used DTP for years because it makes conversion to epub harder and PDF is best for paper publishing and can be produced without InDesign or other DTP easily unless you are working for a magazine or newspaper.

[JSWolf]

Do not create fixed-layout eBooks. They do not work in most cases.

If you are not creating a fixed layout eBook, take the ePub from InDesign and load it into either the calibre editor or Sigil and edit it. Make the code as simple as possible and make it well formatted with no overall L/R margins.

I've edited plenty of eBooks that have come from InDesign and it's not all that difficult.

[Hitch]

Hi, A_Rina:

Question, if I may?

When you say it's breaking and talk about the background, DO YOU MEAN that you expected that The Chapter 1, 1811 TEXT would show up floating over the blue painting background?

Is that what you mean, maybe? Can you show us that page, from your PDF? Beause * think that's what you mean and if it is, we can talk about that.

Guys, I think that s/he means that s/he has text floating atop background images so of course that's "breaking' when it's an ePUB. If that's the case, making this beauty in Word or LO or Bob's Big Word Processor will NOT change that....

Hitch

[Karellen]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Guys, I think that s/he means that s/he has text floating atop background images

Yep, that's already been established in this post...
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...23&postcount=9

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Karellen

Yep, that's already been established in this post...
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...23&postcount=9

OH, ahah, I somehow either misread it or...whatever.

Okay well...A_Rina, do you still need help?

Hitch

[A_Rina]

Originally Posted by Hitch

OH, ahah, I somehow either misread it or...whatever.

Okay well...A_Rina, do you still need help?

Hitch

Yeah, I could use some help. I think I'll remove the background and blue blocks (with dates) in the layout. The problem that remains is that the content and frontispiece are getting on top of each other. I'm attaching screenshots! I would like to get an explanation of why this is happening with these pages (the others are displayed normally) and it is important for me to try to fix it myself to understand. The first two screenshots are the broken display of pages, from 3 to 5 - this is how it should be displayed according to the idea, this is a screenshot of the pdf file.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by A_Rina

Yeah, I could use some help. I think I'll remove the background and blue blocks (with dates) in the layout. The problem that remains is that the content and frontispiece are getting on top of each other. I'm attaching screenshots! I would like to get an explanation of why this is happening with these pages (the others are displayed normally) and it is important for me to try to fix it myself to understand. The first two screenshots are the broken display of pages, from 3 to 5 - this is how it should be displayed according to the idea, this is a screenshot of the pdf file.

Hi:

Okay, a few things.

Firstly, how are you separating your pages, sections or chapters? For example, in the one, the page with the image of Van Gogh, it looks as though the pages or sections both before it and after are crowding in on the page, yes?

What exactly, coding-wise, is between those?

In my own ePUBs and in those my company makes, we put individual sections in their own HTML or XHTML files. Like so, as an example:

cover.html (or xhtml)
title.html (ditto)
copy.html (ditto, etc.)
ded.html
for.html
...and so on.

I'm 99% sure that you're NOT doing that; that you're separating your "pages" with..oh, page breaks or empty paragraphs or the like. Try putting your individual front matter sections into their ONW html sections/files and see if that doesn't help enormously.

With regard to the TOC layout, the chapter numbers inside the box--you should really give that up now. It CAN be done, somewhat, but it will never look like what you expect; it won't align with the section or chapter titles, at all. You're...you're banging your head against the wall.

Try those things first and let's see how far you get, eh?

Hitch