Tuesday, June 7, 2011

ebook Formatting Workflow

Since I've trial'd and error'd it out for myself, and it's not that difficult, here's the Official David Barron eBook Formatting Workflow! Note that it doesn't include how to do images, because I haven't tried that yet. It's also pretty bare-bones, but you can probably figure it out... (This doesn't count as my Friday article) If you totally want to hire me to format an eBook, first, seek professional help because you're insane, then give me $50 and I'll do it, I guess. Free money, am I right? (This takes...15 minutes.)

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 &rdquo;

“ with &ldquo;

‘ with &lsquo;

’ with &rsquo;

… with &hellip;

— with &mdash;

è with &egrave;

é with &eacute;

Bold 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 &amp; in jEdit

Calibre 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

3 comments:

  1. 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.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This looks really helpful--I'll have to bookmark this for future use.

    ReplyDelete
  3. It'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.

    I just don't know if I'm that lazy yet.

    ReplyDelete

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