Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Are there any plans to allow direct creation of the typical epublication formats .epub and .mobi? Currently we can create .pdf versions of our documents, but not the .epub and .mobi versions many epublishers want. To create an ebook, I now strip out most of the formatting, then crate an html version which I use Calibre to convert to the epublishing formats. Finally,I read or at least scan the document to make sure it is (at least nearly) correctly created.
I am President of SouthWest Writers and think many of our members, and probably most writers, would like a simple way to create ebooks. If this feature does not exist (I couldn't find it) and there are no plans for its addition, is there something I can do to encourage OpenOffice.org to consider it?
Thank you for your product,
Lee Higbie, President, SouthWest Writers and long-term OO user

Have you tried the Writer2Epub extension: http://extensions.openoffice.org/en/project/writer2epub

No. I'll check it out. When I searched the OO site I found no reference to epub nor to mobi. Thank you for the pointer.
I downloaded and installed the extension, but haven't found any documentation on how to use it. Do you know where that is?
BTW, SothWest Writers and Univ of NM offer classes in epublishing. If the extension is easy enough to use, it will eliminate about half the class (or make time for more useful material).

Does Calibre not read an .odt file directly, without need to convert to .html?

It may now. Didn't use to. Biggest problem for me is the unformatting before epub creation. Things like bold and italics are needed, but page and most paragraph formatting is not. Indenting paragraphs may change, but most white space needs to be eliminated.

Any time I needed an epub (Kindle 3-4 target) I was able to feed my formatted .odt file (set for A5 /US brochure size print) direct into Calibre; there is some internal adjustment for formatting options (which possibly can be saved - I can't remember), and got a reasonably readable text out. As far as I remember it ignored page formatting (except for Chapter page breaks) and honoured the paragraph breaks.

I've just checked

See
http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/#custom ... conversion
for detailed discussion on ebook conversion,

Well, there’s a good substitution to ePub, namely FictionBook 2 (FB2). And there’s an excellent extension for exporting to FB2: OOoFBTools.