Best way for an idiot to make her own books?

[ziegl027]

I'm interested in cobbling together (for my own personal use) books out of bits and pieces I get here and there. For instance, a cookbook. Right now I have an expandable file folder with printouts of recipes from a variety of sources. It would be great if I could organize them together into a electronic book. Perfect world it would have hyperlinks and fancy stuff like that, but if that's a lot of work the electronic equivalent of my file folder with tabs would be fine. In the case of the recipes, they are short enough that I'm OK with doing a bit of format editing here and there to clean up line breaks and so forth. Where do I even start? What program would be best?

[frabjous]

What format(s) are these files in?

[ziegl027]

Originally Posted by frabjous

What format(s) are these files in?

They're kinda all over the map, mostly HTML and PDF's. Some I have successfully grabbed with Instapaper and gotten epub files. I know that I will have to convert most, if not all of them, into SOMETHING else. But I don't know what. Or maybe even just type the darn things out over again. I could just copy and paste (or type) into Word. But it'd be great if there is a program that would let me do some kind of more functional table of contents, for example. Plus I prefer not to use the Sony Library if I can help it, and near as I can tell that's the only way to get a Word document over onto my device. Calibre apparently won't convert Word files.

[frabjous]

My best advice would be first to try to convert them all to the same format. HTML is probably best. I personally would probably use AbiWord, which can convert most Word Processing formats (doc, docx, odt, etc.) to HTML--even PDF--though the results are not always perfect. Of course, calibre can convert PDF to HTML too. You could do most of it with MS Word too (use filtered HTML as output); I mainly use AbiWord, since it runs on linux, which I use, and you can do conversions from the commandline, which makes it easy to script for batch conversions.

Then create another HTML document that links to all those HTML documents. I believe if you then convert the HTML file that links to the others into ePub with calibre, it'll pull all the others into the document with it, with a ToC. Prince XML might be able to do a nice conversion from a set of html docs to PDF too.

If you got them all into PDF format, you could probably combine them with pdflatex with a ToC, though that's got a much steeper learning curve.

I'd be happy to provide additional help with, e.g., batch converting and the like, but it would help to know what operating system you're using.

Would it be "good enough" just to convert all the files into separate files useable on your device and just use its menu to choose between them? (You could use a genre or tag to separate them from your other ebooks.)

[rocketgranny]

Hi Ziegl027:

If you ever get interested in turning your digital recipe collection into a "real" book, visit www.volcanoarts.biz. It's an arts and crafts kind of site and they carry slews of "stuff" for bookbinding plus starter kits for newbies. I've been pleased with all of my purchases (quality, timeliness, etc) from volcanoarts.

Regards,
RocketGranny

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by ziegl027

I'm interested in cobbling together (for my own personal use) books out of bits and pieces I get here and there. For instance, a cookbook. Right now I have an expandable file folder with printouts of recipes from a variety of sources. It would be great if I could organize them together into a electronic book. Perfect world it would have hyperlinks and fancy stuff like that, but if that's a lot of work the electronic equivalent of my file folder with tabs would be fine. In the case of the recipes, they are short enough that I'm OK with doing a bit of format editing here and there to clean up line breaks and so forth. Where do I even start? What program would be best?

Well, it looks like, with the advice you've already been given, that you should be well on your way. However, before you get too far along, might I point out that the *first step* - turning yourself into an idiot (which clearly you are NOT at this time) - is irreversible and should not be taken lightly.

Derek

[mediax]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

However, before you get too far along, might I point out that the *first step* - turning yourself into an idiot (which clearly you are NOT at this time) - is irreversible and should not be taken lightly.

However, it's not without its compensations, as evidenced by the old rhyme:

See the happy moron
He doesn't give a damn
I wish I were a moron
My God - I think I am!

Apologies for

And good luck to the OP

[apswartz]

Originally Posted by frabjous

My best advice would be first to try to convert them all to the same format. HTML is probably best.

{snip}

Then create another HTML document that links to all those HTML documents. I believe if you then convert the HTML file that links to the others into ePub with calibre, it'll pull all the others into the document with it, with a ToC. Prince XML might be able to do a nice conversion from a set of html docs to PDF too.

This is what I've done and I found it easy and effective.

[kc5cychris]

I use paper port it creats PDF files from what ever you want to print, then you can put it together (Cobbling) so that you may use it than adjust your out put paper size to match your viewing pleasure and save it whatever name.pdf