Creating eBooks - formats, problems

[marcinJ13]

Hi there.

I have some books, and short stories that I would love to keep on my SD card for reading with CyBook. However I found some problems with conversion.

First I started with Word documents converted to Mobipocket. Immediately I have discovered following problems: complete disregard for multiple empty lines and treating word breaking as normal hyphen. In efect it was "abso-lu-te-ly un-read-able".

Ok, I got over it by converting it to HTML and then removing word breaking (Character with ASCII code 173) and adding <br /> manually wherever I needed it. Well it worked. I managed to create mobipocket book.

Then I noticed that all the footnotes I had in Word document were converted to endnotes and moved to the end of the book.

Hmmm... time for drastic measures. I have converted my book to PDF. Well the good thing was that it kept the layout and my footnotes and all the fancy stuff.... but without ability to change font size.

Additionaly I had to use some fancy software to convert images to cover format for CyBook... and those images are not visible in Mobipocket reader.

So ...




I need help. Anyone has any idea what else can I do ? The three most important elements are: footnotes (not end-notes), ability to change font size and having cover image somewhere in the same file.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

[JSWolf]

Because of the way that Mobipocket is a reflowable format, you will find that footnotes do not work. They work best as end notes. Same goes for any reflowable format such as LRF or eReader.

Now what you can do is clean up your eBook in Word and then load it into Book Designer. After you then do anyy cleaning up/formatting needed in there, you can follow HarryT's directions on how to make a proper Mobipockert format eBook and once done, you'll be al set. I suggest reading the entire thread at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=17914 and it will teach you what you need to know.

[zelda_pinwheel]

for the footnotes / endnotes problem, i've found that for reasonably short footnotes the solution i prefer is to place them immediately after the paragraph which references them, in the flow of the text, setting them apart with a smaller font size, italics, indent, etc.

i find this less disruptive to my reading flow, more like footnotes available in the same page (which i also prefer to endnotes in paper books), than having to jump all the way to the end of the text for each note. if you don't want to read the notes you can easily skip over them, especially if they are properly formatted to be easy to identify.

it also has the advantage of being very easy to implement regardless of the format, and completely reflowable.

[JSWolf]

It's even easier to ignore endnotes as all you have to ignore is the link.

[zelda_pinwheel]

well, true, but we have to hope that if the notes are there in the first place it's because they add something relevant and interesting to the text, and more people will *want* to read them than not.

--Zelda (who always reads the notes)

[JSWolf]

In the Discworld series, the footnotes are always very useful to read.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by marcinJ13

Hi there.


First I started with Word documents converted to Mobipocket. Immediately I have discovered following problems: complete disregard for multiple empty lines and treating word breaking as normal hyphen. In efect it was "abso-lu-te-ly un-read-able".

Ok, I got over it by converting it to HTML and then removing word breaking (Character with ASCII code 173) and adding <br /> manually wherever I needed it. Well it worked. I managed to create mobipocket book.

173 is actually a soft hyphen meaning it should only show up when needed at the end of a line. If mobi files show it all the time then that is a bug that needs correcting in the reader.

Dale