How to create books from A-Z in BookDesigner.

[ProDigit]

Hi all,
I've received a request on this site, to write down how to write a good book in BookDesigner.

I understand that this thread is going to be long, but it's only for those who are interested in learning either how to do it, or seeing an alternative way on how to create a book!

If you want to skip the introduction, you can go to the first reply in this thread. This first thread (introduction) should prepare new book makers a bit in the world of book making!
The first reply on this thread would be the actual process

My experience dates from 2-3 years ago, and I no longer am in possession of the software and programs I used to have on my old computer to create these books, so most of it is written out of my memory.
Forgive me if I make errors, as my memory may be failing me here or there in the details.

First, I have to tell you that the process is very intensive!
You can not expect to convert an analog book to digital format in 2 hours!
Making a book takes a lot of time; most of the time it takes at least 10 of your hours to create a book that takes you 1 hour to read if you want to at least deliver a decent work!
It'll take less and less time as you get better with it, and you find ways to optimize the work process, but in this thread I wanted to help you find some ways on how to do that!

What helps you maintain the heavy workload, is remembering that the 10 hours you put into your book, will be appreciated by many; who thanks to your efforts will not need to be spending 10 hours converting, but can go right on reading after downloading the book!

If you remember that you are doing this for the community, and that many are happy you do this for them, it should help you maintain focus until the finished work, as creating a book involves a lot of work.

Making a book has several stages.
I'll tell you the basics, but it involves you figuring out problems and finding remedies. In this guideline I only give you some basic pointers, and an idea of what fellow book makers are going through creating a book like this.


In this example I will start from scanning a book. If you have a digital copy of this book, try extracting the text from there, as it will leviate about 50% of the workload (the most intense is scanning, and correcting the scans, but more on that later).

Every book you convert will be plagued with different problems, and it's upto you to find remedies to these problems, that will fix the issues fast, correctly, and without too much sweat.

[ProDigit]

Books that are new and written in large print are usually easier to convert.
Older books with yellowed paper, and smaller letters are more hard to convert.
In this example I will start from scanning a book. If you have a digital copy of this book, try extracting the text from there, as it will levitate about 50% of the workload (the most intense is scanning, and correcting the scans, but if not, the first two steps are important for you!).
The first step is to scan a book in hi-res.
The higher the resolution, usually the better the text recognition will be; but also the longer the conversion process will take.
But believe me, a good slower conversion process with larger bmp files is preferred over hand correcting the errors of a low res conversion.

You will have to also select the best scan settings. Finding the right resolution and trying to scan your document in 256 BW (grey) colors is preferred. Some newer books do well with 16 colors.
Only super white books with super black large text, is best to scan at BW mode (2 color, 1 bit).
In 16 color mode make sure no spots are visible on the scan (eg coffee marks, of the page, which would be a cause for errors in the conversion process).
Setting the right contrast helps in the conversion process.
It is better to oversaturate the paper, that it all looks white, than to set the color mode in such a contrast that you can see spots and crinkles of the paper in the digital format.

Oversaturate the scan, that the paper will be white, and the text still readable black.


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Second step is the text recognition/conversion software.
I had an expensive adobe suit that I used successfully but it has been collecting dust in my closet for years. I even forgot the name of it.
You can download some free-ware from some sites, or decide to pay extra.
Converting analog books to digital text is probably the only software that costs real money!
The rest can be done with free programs!

Try converting only those parts of the page where page numbers of the book are not visible.
Many conversion softwares allow you to draw a square on your documents, and scan each subsequent BMP/JPG/GIF file with those same border settings.
Page numbers will be different on your reader anyway, and they interfere in the conversion process (become garbled text that no one really understands).


You could try running a conversion software that has an internal auto-correct and dictionary support; but some may prefer to not run it through a dictionary, but to allow the program to make mistakes more obvious, and manually correct them later for a more precise output file (less mistakes with manual conversion).


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Third load the converted text into a word editor that has a dictionary / spelling checker like MS Office Word, or OoO Open Office writer.

You need to use writer or word to easily notice spelling and grammar errors.
Basically what you will do is start reading the book. Any errors you see, scan/skim the document for THE SAME errors; and if you find that a certain error repeats itself, you will have to use a batch correcting of errors, by using the "find & replace all" feat in your editor.

Quite often when the conversion software makes an error, any subsequent word combination that is the same will be converted incorrectly too.

Example:
If you notice in the text that a part of the sentence "I am" always is written as "1 am" (I from me, converted as 1 from number one), you can find and replace in Writer or Word all strings "1 am", and replace them with "I am".

Or, another;
If you see that the conversion process ended sentences without a space behind the dot, you will need to find and replace feature of your editor to automatically add a space behind every dot, replacing all instances in the whole document.

By creating this rule, you may accidentally add 2 spaces behind sentences that have been converted correctly!
To counteract this, you will have to create an additional rule to replace all 'dot-space-space' with just 'dot-space', taking away the second space behind the dot, since that would be a very unusual combination.


In your first book, you will create lots of rules, which are very time consuming.
However all those rules you can write in a macro in word.
I remember my standard macro had about 40-50 rules that it automatically applied to any new book. This would often levitate 15-20% of the workload, allowing me to focus on other word patterns and less common mistakes of the conversion process.

A macro basically is an automated task, that will re-perform the actions you did on any subsequent document you load.
You can record a macro in MS Word, and play it back.
You'll just need to learn to use it. Takes about 1 hour to fully understand the basics of a macro.

The choice is yours, either fix one book, by manually changing each error, and not bothering with macro's; or spend some extra time learning how to write macros, and have any subsequent book automatically treated (and save many hours of work on each additional book, at the cost of a slower release of your first book!).


In short the things you'll need to learn in a text editor is:
- How to find and replace wrong words using the dictionary and spelling editor integrated in your document.
- How to correct basic layout issues (don't worry about bold lettering, just a quick edit of titles, punctuation, and paragraphs).
- How to make all paragraph letters equal size, and make all titles equal in size too.
Also try using only one or two letter types per book. The conversion process often mixes up letter size and letter type.
- How to use the search/find and replace ALL - feat.
- How to create macro's to do the work for you in this book, and any subsequent books you will be converting
- How to convert your document to an HTML!


When saving a document to .doc or other format, it becomes hard to edit. For that reason HTML is the preferred choice.
However, in Word, or even Writer, you'll notice a lot of unnecessary code in the HTML file.
It is not practical to do subsequent editing like this.
Instead mark the whole text of the book (without HTML code), and paste it into a program like eclipse, or another simple HTML editor.
If my memory serves me well, eclipse will maintain titles, and letter formatting, but will get rid of a whole bunch of code from MS office Word, or OoO writer.

If you want to work with free programs you'll need to learn a bunch of programs, as no single program is really great in doing everything, unless perhaps a very expensive program!


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Fourth, load the text in an HTML editor (like eclipse, mentioned above)!

Book designer is very buggy, and I've noticed, that the only files it does convert with the least of issues is HTML.
Technically it can convert some other document formats, but HTML is really the most reliable.
You won't need to learn to write full HTML code, but you will need to learn how to stripe HTML off of any unnecessary code.
You begin by (like mentioned above) marking all the text of the whole book, and copying it to the clip board.
Then paste it into an editor like eclipse (I remember using 2 different ones, but forgot the name of the other (much better) program).
The difference between this html editor and saving a document in an HTML format in word/writer, is that the code is cleaned upto twice as good!


Once that's done, you'll have to go into HTML edit mode in your HTML editor, and copy the whole HTML text, from there, and paste it into Notepad++.
I use Notepad++ for it's superior HTML editing and macro capabilities.
Notepad ++ has advanced feats that allow you to batch remove a whole bunch of code, and further convert/reduce unnecessary code, and correct layout/code issues.
Your aim in this final step is to reduce the HTML code, and make sure there's still a layout structure (title, hyper-links, and text).

Not all HTML code is recognized by BD, you will have to find which is, and which is not!
And removing or changing those code, that BD does not recognize!
(See below for some codes that BD accepts!)

After find/replacing bad code, and correcting layout issues, you'll need to save your HTML file in Notepad++.

This file will be the template for BD!

In this step You'll have to have learned basic HTML coding, and things like how to create:
- titles
- Centered text
- Stretched/right aligned/left aligned
- Hyperlinks
- Underlined/BOLD/Italic text
- Page breaks
- Recognize and removing unwanted code, and creating an HTML file down to the core basics of an HTML file!
- Add pictures to the HTML source, or within Book Designer.

All these HTML feats BD supports.
To learn basic HTML code by striping documents, you'll need about a good 2 to 3 hours of practice with a document and eclipse, where you can see what HTML edits do to the actual web layout.

When you have finished creating your HTML, you can convert it into BD.
BookDesigner is a very buggy product, in which you will want to do as little actions as possible!
Just keeping it to converting an HTML file, and perhaps add an opening picture(cover), and some additional pictures if you'd like.

When converting in BD, it is interesting to see what BD makes of your HTML file!
It basically generates an alternate HTML of your source file.
You can learn BD HTML code in a few minutes, by just looking at the differences between your source HTML and the BD conversion!
Learning BD code allows you to modify your source HTML file into a more optimized way, so that BD will have an easy time converting the file without errors; generally further striping the file from unnecessary code, or correcting some code that after conversion may look funky.

Things like (eg):

<i><b>this is bold and italic text wrongly formatted.</i></b>

Will cause errors in BD!

Can you see how I first started the document by enabling the italic text (<i>), then BOLD(<b>), but closing it in the same way?
The correct way to format it would be:

<i><b>this is bold and italic text correctly formatted.</b></i>

Where b starts after i, and closes before i closes!


When you finished converting the book into book designer, you can do a first alpha reading, to see if there are any errors left in the text, and any layout issues, as well as test any hyperlinks or menu structures (index).
This process takes a long time, as you'll need to re-read the whole book, and update the HTML code as you read it.
This will be the third time reading it (the first time scanning the document for obvious, reoccurring errors, the second time for smaller errors with your original book next to you; the third time reading it from your reader device, correcting the HTML to be reconverted in BD).

You can also decide to add some pictures on some pages, or add a book cover picture.


Concerning correcting the HTML,
It is much preferred to read your book on the device itself!

For instance, I converted a version of the bible with 100 something books, and something like 1200 chapters, each chapter title requiring a separate hyper-link.
On the computer the book worked flawlessly, but on the device, errors happened, because the Sony PRS505 did not have sufficient memory to handle all the links.

Test your books on your reader, not only on the computer!

When you read through the book completely, and corrected the errors, make a beta, and try seeing if the errors are still there.
Only when the beta passes the test, it will be ready for a first release.
Many of us have updated an existing release. Keep your originals and pictures saved somewhere (preferably on an external harddrive or flash drive, for future corrections)!


I recommend reading/skimming the book 3 times before making it public!
5 times makes a good conversion, and 7 times is perfection!
In general, reading it 3 times over, is enough to create a readable book, with few errors, that are not too disturbing to the future readers!

[Dr. Drib]

This has already been done, I believe.

Harry (I think it was him) wrote an exceptional tutorial on Book Designer, which I used when I put together my close to 600 unique titles that are available in the Library here.


Don

[ProDigit]

Yeah, this is just describing the whole process of converting a book, not really the details on how to use BD.