From ODT to EPUB with love

[roger64]

I open a new thread because I will probably have some questions to ask about this topic.

I enjoy producing ebooks with OpenOffice. I usually upload some of them to MobileRead in PDF and ODT formats and I am considering using EPUB as well.

These books have a basic structure: Title with heading 1, Part with heading 2, Chapter with heading 3 . I usually insert a TOC with hyperlinks. I use no more than these three hierarchical levels.

Question

I want to obtain a TOC in my output EPUB file which will represent these three hierarchical levels.

Which XPath or whatever mysterious text must I write here? (see joint photo). Please provide me with the full line of text to insert in this place.

Are there any basic recommendations to prepare my ODT file for EPUB output ?

[roger64]

Well, I went back to read the fine calibre usermanual about this fine expression (see photo above).

The full comment is here:

"This expression is rather complex, because it tries to handle a number of common cases simulataneously (simultaneously?). What it means is that calibre will assume chapters start at either <h1> or <h2> tags that have any of the words (chapter, book, section or part) in them or that have the class=”chapter” attribute.

Comment

As OO accepts usually one line for "Title", to get undertandable TOCs, I usually skips "chapter" names, (for me "chapitre"). This is one thing.

Question

So I would ask, how to insert some "class="chapter" attributes in my ODT file?
What's that? Is it dangerous?

[roger64]

I follow on my studying (sorry I go slowly), still looking for a nice TOC generation in EPUB.

I tested some conversions from ODT to EPUB with test files.
I can generate a TOC (all have the same level) from heading + a name like chapter. Well, this way I get a basic TOC. We can do better.

The surprising thing is that the footnotes are all sent at the end of the book and have an hyperlink. This is NICE, if somewhat surprising.

Later, I will ask how to center my images...

Question
I have read that in the xhtml that calibre use as input, there is a possibility to insert some options like:
Level 1 TOC : //h:h1
Level 2 TOC : //h:h2
Level 3 TOC : //h:h2
As I do not see this xhtml file, I would like to know how and where to let calibre know I would like to use these options. I tried to write this in the calibre GUI to no avail.

[roger64]

Well, if there is a newbie who wants to know, after some fiddling I finally found how to generate a hierarchical TOC in EPUB from a ODT file using calibre.

Just see photo in attachment. It's working. This damned //h:h2

Wish you goodnight.

Solution

[roger64]

Though I did not receive too many answers up to now, it may happen..
Guru, where are you?

I am quite busy creating epub from odt files thru calibre.
I just discovered thru w3school the magic world of CSS and extra.css.
I used these rules with good effect
.endnote {font-size:10px;}
p {line-height:1.4;}

question

I would like to use an extra.css rule to get centered images.
Now the images are set on the left side.

Thank you for any reply.

[zelda_pinwheel]

Originally Posted by roger64

Though I did not receive too many answers up to now, it may happen..
Guru, where are you?

I am quite busy creating epub from odt files thru calibre.
I just discovered thru w3school the magic world of CSS and extra.css.
I used these rules with good effect
.endnote {font-size:10px;}
p {line-height:1.4;}

question

I would like to use an extra.css rule to get centered images.
Now the images are set on the left side.

Thank you for any reply.

hi roger, i guess all the guru were away for the weekend.

for centered images, you can try this css code :

.center {text-align : center;}

however you will have to add it to the images within the code, like this :

<div class="center"><img alt="" src="../images/img0002.jpg" /></div>

i don't know if there is a way to automatise this in calibre... (gurus ??) but you can use sigil to edit your epub files and modify the code as you like.

[roger64]

Thanks Zelda. You are indeed a guru.

Too bad, there seems to be no clear cut solution lile adding another basic extra.css rule just to do it.

I am not considering at that time to use another editor for this. I am already off limits.
Processing manually the code is also already beyond my today abilities.

When googling, I found an "old" recommendation from Kovid about it that I did not understand: to insert somewhere

<div style="text-align:center">
<img>
</div>

I tried to use it as a extra css rule but it did not work.

[kovidgoyal]

If you center the image in openoffice it should be centered in the resulting EPUB as well. Is that not the case?

[roger64]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

If you center the image in openoffice it should be centered in the resulting EPUB as well. Is that not the case?

No. On my Sony they are stuck on the left side.

I send you my test file -could be smaller- with two images plus one cover.

[kovidgoyal]

Open a ticket and attach the files, I can't keep track of forum posts.

[roger64]

OK Thanks I'll do that.

[roger64]

First I need to apologize, I sent my ticket, I messed horribly and sent, all in all, four tickets. It was my first ticket but a good one....

I have time to study the little quirks encountered while converting odt to epub. Here are the main remaining ones.

Images
I already spoke about the small non centered images.
Another visualization defect is the following: I send one image which takes all the width of the screen but only half of the height.
What I get is only a central part of this image, full screen and with an -of course- bad resolution.
Is this normal?? Am I missing something

serif Font
I wish to obtain Times New Roman, serif on my epub
I get it on a small file (80 kb) but NOT on a big one (1.5 MB)
TNR is of course part of the original odt file.
I use the following extra.css rule with calibre
body {font-family:"Times New Roman", Times, serif;}
Any tip?

Numbering
Strange results, but better leave it for now.

Somebody has any info how to solve these questions?

[roger64]

About the serif font.

I renamed my epub file to zip, opened it, and had a look a the stylesheet.css file with a text editor (gedit with Linux). It was a pretty long one but I quickly realized that close to Times New Roman there was always written sans-serif.

I searched and replaced 22 occurences of sans-serif with serif, saved and made a new epub.

But when I opened the file on my PRS-505? it was declared "invalid file"...

Had a good dinner then.
Except dinner, any idea?

[roger64]

About the serif font

I think there is a mistake in the converting process of calibre.

Opening the stylesheet.css in my epub, I found 22 occurences of font-family, Times New Roman, sans-serif.

sans-serif provokes in fact a change of police.

I used tweak_epub.exe (works with Wine; info for Linux users) to search and replace all occurences of sans-serif with serif, and this time it worked well (this is tricky). I got a real TNR with serif on my epub file.

question

can somebody give me the extra.css rule for increasing the space between the lines of text? I get nothing with line-height...

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by roger64

question

can somebody give me the extra.css rule for increasing the space between the lines of text? I get nothing with line-height...

I have used line height on my prs-505 with success.

p {
line-height: 110%
}

div {
line-height: 110%
}

This though isn't with extra css it is with my style.css file controlling the fontin fonts I installed on my machine for epubs using the PRS+ hack.