New epub production tool

[Abekonge]

Hi all,

I thought you might be interested to know that we've recently released version 0.0.5 of the epub production tool Scripler. We hope to make ebook production more plug'n'play and less coding'n'converting.

Main features:

• WYSIWYG editor
• 16 ready-made book design templates
• Insert cover, images and hyperlinks
• Automatic layout of title page, table of contents, and colophon
• Outputs valid & ready-to-publish EPUB 3 ebooks.
• Import manuscripts from Word/OpenOffice
• Publish ebook directly on the web

Check it out online at scripler.com and PLEASE tell me what you think!

EDIT: v0.0.6 released. See this post.

[Katsunami]

People who invented vertical tabs should be <censored>. They are hell, as I feel like titling my head left or right all the time. They were the first thing I noticed, and my immediate reaction was "I'll never be using this."

My advice would be to stick to normal menu, or icons with tooltips.

[Abekonge]

I'm sorry that the vertical tabs destroys your experience - I'll note it down for further consideration.

If you would rather see a video, we have a short book production walkthrough:



One of our key goals is to make basic typographical book design something everyone can have in ebooks. So we are working with book design templates that defines a complete typograhical look for a book, with embedded fonts and all. The user can freely change the book template by applying it to the chapter or the whole eboook, so you can for example write/produce your book with a "Draft" design, which makes copy editing and proof reading easier, and then when you are ready to download/publish, you can try out and select any of the 17 book design templates

(note that applying a book design to the whole book at once, will be possible in the coming version 0.0.6 - we are currently testing it.)

[odedta]

Sweet! I'd like to see this developed further.

[dickloraine]

I only watched the video, but from what I've seen, I don't like the templates. They seem to do anything I hate to see in eBooks. Of course this is personal preference, but: No indents but margins on every paragraph is something I hate (some people like it). Since indents are the norm on printed books, it is in my opinion better to do it that way. Embedding fonts for the normal paragraphs is also not really great. Fonts for headings and special cases are okay, but not for the body. I like to read in a font I like.
Since this is a solution for people who don't have great knowledge about epubs, I think it is bad if the basic templates do something like that.
The idea is good, but please consider the points above.

[Abekonge]

Thanks for the feedback odedta and dickloraine!

There is no margin-top/bottom on the paragraphs - in the video there is just blank lines between the parapgraphs for some reason. (If you want you can actually add e.g. margin-top or first line indents to paragraphs of a new template - you can make you own templates, with full control of most relevant css via a control panel (margins, firstline-indent, fonts, font-size, line-height, semantics, text-alignments, bold, italic, caps, super/sub, lists). (NB!The full styling panel and the make-your-own-design-templates-functionality are still early versions, so there are known glitches there...)

I agree that first line indent would be great as a default in at least some templates, and this is what we initially had. But for it to really work we needed to give the user control of this - so we prioritized to not include first-line indents until we could give the user full control over the indentation rules for the templates.

As for the fonts, I am of the opinion that creators should be able to define the default look for their works, as they do in print books and as they do on websites - since the typographical experience is central to a good reading experience (IMHO). But only for the default look, so that you as a user can always change the font on your reader system of choice. (how this is defined in our CSS needs to play nice with how readers systems changes the fonts - this is something that might need more work to work with all reader systems, though).

All in all there is a lot of prioritizing with a project like this - what we use a lot of energy on right now is securing that people can't make invalid epubs. Since we try to give people a lot of (non-coding) control - there are a lot of variables to consider. But it's getting better and better.

The coming version 0.0.6 has experimental publish-to-the-web functionality, ads color-controls, better word-import and in general a lot of polishing.

[Abekonge]

We have recently released an improved version of Scripler.

Biggest addition is that you can publish an ebook directly to the web. For an example you can see this test book online.

Another of our main goals it to make ebooks a first class citizen on the internet, I think this involves easy web publishing, in the same way we can publish video on the web. So you could for example embed ebooks on other pages like you can do with e.g. youtube videos. What do you think?


Changelog

### New features

• Publish Scripler book on the web:
  • One click publishing
  • Everyone in the world can reach and read your book
  • Simple bookmarks and book-navigation features
  • Update your published book instantly
  • Unpublish
• Import from word now supports images. Glorious glorious images!
• Colors colors colors. You can now change the text color and the background color.
• Book designs can be applied to the whole book automatically. Seriously - this is great!

### Enhancements

• Mobile-ready frontpage (responsive)
• Hyperlink sub-tab displays the details of existing hyperlink, when cursor is placed in it.
• Helpful explanations added to `Insert`.
• Instant save is now very reliable

###Fixed bugs

• Hyperlink: choose existing target overwrites selection
• ToC is wrongly the first document in the book when downloaded
• Cover-specification in landmarks in nav.xhtml breaks Kindle Direct Publishing upload
• Anchor list not initially populated
• Invalid numeric id's added to headings when copy-pasting
• Footnotes in word documents breaks epub validation
• Anchors breaks validation
• Not defining chapter names breaks validation
• Focus not always returned to editor
• File size limit on import too limited
• Error when uploading image with uppercase fileextension
• The month is 1 behind in scripler project dates.
• When going below 900px no menu items are shown on the frontpage
• Insert anchor: placing cursor, manually typing anchor name and then clicking insert - does not work.
• Register bar covers up stuff
• Can't scroll when there are more ebook projects than fits the screen!