eBook Formatting
Programs
FocusWriter for text
Microsoft Word 2007 for DOC and pre-formatting
jEdit for HTML
calibre for conversion to EPUB and MOBI
GIMP for cover art
Kindle Previewer
FocusWriter text
type, use -- for — (em dash)
Microsoft Word 2007 preformatting
double quotes : " with "
single quotes : ' with '
em dash : -- with —
ellipses : ... with …
Ctrl-i to
<i>^&</i>jEdit entities
paragraphs:
^(.+)$ with <p>$1</p>search for <p></i> and fix
” with
”“ with
“‘ with
‘’ with
’… with
…— with
—è with
èé with
éBold with
<strong>Bold</strong>Strikethrough with
<del>Strikethrough</del>jEdit styles
Apply this header, wrap with body tags
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<head>
<style type="text/css">
html, body, div, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, ul, ol, dl, li, dt, dd, p, pre, table, th, td, tr { margin: 0; padding: 0em; }
p
{
text-indent: 1.5em;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}
p.noindent
{
text-indent: 0em;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}
p.preview
{
margin-top: 5em;
margin-bottom: 2em;
}
p.title
{
page-break-before: always;
font-size: 3em;
font-weight: bold;
margin-top: 5em;
}
p.subtitle
{
text-indent: 3em;
font-size: 2em;
font-weight: bold;
}
p.author
{
text-indent: 3em;
font-size: 2em;
}
p.matter
{
text-indent: 3em;
font-size: 1.5em;
}
p.chapter
{
page-break-before: always;
text-indent: 1.5em;
font-weight: bold;
font-size: 2em;
margin-top:5em;
margin-bottom:2em;
}
p.story
{
text-indent: 1.5em;
font-size: 1em;
margin-top: 5em;
margin-bottom: 0.2em;
}
p.centered
{
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: center;
}
span.centered
{
text-indent: 0em;
text-align: center;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
</body>
Book Chapters/Collection Stories =
<p class="chapter">Chapter Title</p>
Individual Short Story 'chapter' (for clean ToC) =
<p class="chapter" style="display:none">Short Story Title</p>
<p class="story">First paragraph of text</p>
Apply other styles
*** with <p class="centered"><span class="centered">***</span></p>
Search for & in browser window, then manually replace & with
& in jEditCalibre conversion
Add HTML to Calibre, edit metadata, add cover
Convert to EPUB
Table of Contents
Level 1 TOC (XPath Expression) = //h:p[re:test(@class, "chapter", "i")]
EPUB Output
check 'Preserve cover aspect ratio'
Convert to MOBI
Check DOC in Word 2007, upload to Smashwords
Check MOBI in Kindle Previewer, Upload to Amazon KDP
Check EPUB in calibre, Upload to Others
Samples
 |
| Collection |
 |
| Short Story |
Hey, I'm enjoying your stuff on making ebooks. I've tried to do a little of it myself to read things on my kindle (sometimes I don't like the way that Project Gutenberg formats shit), and never come close to figuring out most of this stuff.
ReplyDeleteThis looks really helpful--I'll have to bookmark this for future use.
ReplyDeleteIt's super easy, and it'd work fine to convert Project Gutenberg plain-text (sans images) to MOBI or EPUB, too. At some point I want to write a jEdit macro to just do this all at one go. Then the world will be mine to command.
ReplyDeleteI just don't know if I'm that lazy yet.