[Solved] Formatting properly for an E-book?

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Rokazulu
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[Solved] Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Rokazulu »

I just released an e-book and I realize that the formatting is all off.

Why can't the program simply format my book as my document looks? I converted the open office document into E-Pub (because it looked the best) using a program called "calibre". This appears to be the only way to format into a file for upload to Amazon. (There are other formats but they differ little)

I need anyone's knowledge about this. What am I leaving out here? Let me know your insights on the matter. I can provide more info where necessary.

EDIT:

Here are some images for you to understand my dilemma easier:
How it looks exported to an e-pub file:
https://imgur.com/YAn4ble
How it looks exported to an e-pub file-.jpg
How it looks on my open office document:
https://imgur.com/E6mDfBQ
How it looks on my open office document 123.jpg
Last edited by Hagar Delest on Mon Dec 14, 2020 11:28 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Reason: Attached images, since links will break; Moved to General Discussion since the question is about Calibre (MrProgrammer). Tagged solved (Hagar)
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RoryOF
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by RoryOF »

Calibre is very effective, but needs careful driving; for a layout such as yours you may need to study and set the parameters in Calibre's Convert books setting.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Mountaineer »

Rokazulu wrote:I just released an e-book and I realize that the formatting is all off.

Why can't the program simply format my book as my document looks?
If this is your goal, export to pdf.
PDF was designed for this.

Ebooks can be shown different on different devices and settings. Quite similiar to the problems of web-Designers with different browsers.

J.
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John_Ha
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by John_Ha »

As mountaineer says, electronic books are formatted so they can be viewed on user-chosen page sizes of different widths and heights.

Standard AOO is based on printing to an author-chosen page size. You need to take account of this and format appropriately. For a start, I doubt you have a new page set after your name.

Search the various forums (Writer, Advanced uses etc) with calibre and / or epub for lots of posts.

Also, did you read the instructions on how to use Calibre? They undoubtedly tell you how to use it and what input it expects. See Calibre User Manual.

Showing that a problem has been solved helps others searching so, if your problem is now solved, please view your first post in this thread and click the Edit button (top right in the post) and add [Solved] in front of the subject.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Villeroy »

[Tutorial] Authoring e-Books in AOpenOffice (epub, ebook)
Side note: Forget about Calibre. Calibre is an excellent eBook library tool, but it's EPUB editor is an added-on afterthought. It can't do the job. Sigil, on the other hand, is a dedicated EPUB editor and makes things very easy.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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RoryOF
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by RoryOF »

Villeroy wrote:[Tutorial] Authoring e-Books in AOpenOffice (epub, ebook)
Side note: Forget about Calibre. Calibre is an excellent eBook library tool, but it's EPUB editor is an added-on afterthought. It can't do the job. Sigil, on the other hand, is a dedicated EPUB editor and makes things very easy.
That Tutorial was written four years ago, and Calibre has been continually updated since then. I would expect EPUB format to be integrated into it by now.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Villeroy »

Calibre could always convert odt to epub semi-automatically. The tutorial is about high-class epub publishing with carefully prepared Writer templates.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by John_Ha »

Villeroy wrote:The tutorial is about high-class epub publishing with carefully prepared Writer templates.
Unfortunately the AOO template mentioned is no longer available at the link provided.

The Calibre User Manual has a whole section on e-book conversion - see E-book conversion. It appears, as expected, that the conversion process first converts to XHTML, which gives the flexibility for different screen sizes; and then converts the XHTML to the output format. In order of decreasing preference the input formats are: LIT, MOBI, AZW, EPUB, AZW3, FB2, FBZ, DOCX, HTML, PRC, ODT, RTF, PDB, TXT, PDF, so .odt is pretty far down the list though it is supported.
Clipboard01.png
If you use the Debug option you get access to each of the four stages of conversion so you can fine tune the output.
Clipboard02.png
I think there is an advantage in checking in Web Layout when editing in AOO because this will pick up things like whether a table is set to full page width, and therefore scales with page size; or to a given fixed width in inches, which breaks if the page size is too small etc.

I believe AOO is pretty lousy for outputting HTML.

A quick google search with best epub editor found much including Best Book Writing Software. He favours Scrivener and explains why he prefers it to MS Word in Word vs Scrivener.
John_Ha wrote:Also, did you read the instructions on how to use Calibre? They undoubtedly tell you how to use it and what input it expects. See Calibre User Manual.
I think read the manual is probably the solution to the poster's problem.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by esperantisto »

Try exporting to FictionBook2 using OOoFBTools. However, FB2 (as EPUB and similar formats) is not designed to produce something that looks exactly as the source file. It is intended to the opposite: to look according to the reader's preferences.
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Villeroy »

I think that proper usage of styles is very important. The conversion relies on the proper distinction of headings and indices.
Please, edit this topic's initial post and add "[Solved]" to the subject line if your problem has been solved.
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Rokazulu
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Re: Formatting properly for an E-book?

Post by Rokazulu »

Thanks for the input. I have a better idea of how to improve my formatting in the future. I am going to save this thread for further insight.
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