Author:
Deadly Ernest
[ Edit | View ]
|
Date Posted: 06:24:59 12/30/11 Fri
>>G'day Doug,
>>
>>If it's not too much trouble, what e-pub convesion
>>software do you use?
>>
>>Lulu did the conversion of some of my stories back in
>>May / July 2011 and they came out utter trash. I've
>>tried putting a few files through their idiot wizard,
>>but it has major issues working out what a headings
>>is. So I'm considering converting my won and seeing if
>>Lulu will take those OK.
>>
>>Regards,
>>
>>Ernest
>
>I've converted doing it 2 ways - the early books on
>this site have been converted taking Wes' rtf / html
>documents through Mobipocket to a prc / mobi file
>compatible with the kindle. I then took those files
>through Calibre to create an acceptable epub file but
>I was not happy with the quality and looked for
>something that gave a bit more creative control.
>
>Since Amazon has bought Mobipocket (and a number of
>other formerly good products like Stanza) it has
>become an orphan product and is dependent on IE7 or in
>compatibility mode IE8 to run. I now use kindlegen to
>create Wes' mobi files.
>
>Kindlegen however, is not for the faint of heart -- it
>has a long learning curve ... the instructions given
>by Amazon are not clear.
>
>Rather than run those files through Calibre, I take
>the HTML files and run them through SIGIL with some
>minor changes to the CSS coding (eliminating all hard
>page breaks mainly).
>
>SIGIL will create a reasonable ePub without much
>problem but ... there are a few gotcha's - it doesn't
>catch all the "must have haves" for LuLu and some of
>the other publishers (not that we have hit the other
>publishers except through LuLu). It does have a built
>in ePub check and if you follow it the epub will check
>out as an ePub 3 on the lastest ePub check tool - at
>least my last one did.
Thanks for the reply Doug,
But, Damn it, you just shot me in both feet. I agree with your assessment of Calibre. I spent a couple of hours today proving how useless it is. I write the books in a 6 x 9 inch book format set up in Libre Office and save as .odt, then save a as print ready PDF. I then convert the .odt to a html and clean up the code, but as BASIC html - no CSS at all. To ready a file for SOL and FS, I take the html version and convert it to tagged text, real easy as the html is very basic.
As I said, I use basic html and can code simple web sites in it, I learned how before they invented CSS. For the stories I use only common HTML tags like those related to FONT, P, H1, H2, H3, B, I, BR plus their relevant closure and refinement tags.
In the book and PDF format, I sue layout to indicate the chapters, sub-chapters, and section headings, in the html and tagged text I use colours to do the same thing, but Calibre and the Lulu e-pub wizard of destruction destroys all that information so I end up huge blocks of text and no way to see where a chapter or sub-chapter starts or ends. I refuse to put a story out in a format that looks like that much crap.
I've not been able to find a way to create an e-pub version that allows me to use reasonable layout or colours to mark the chapters of sub-chapters unless I virtually rewrite the whole story specifically in special codes etc for the e-pub, which I'm not about to do.
Regards,
Ernest
[ Post a Reply to This Message ]
|
