Editing contentīefore generating your eBook, you’ll want to edit it. When you’ve finished putting all your content into LibreOffice, save your work. Be sure every element in your OpenDocument has been marked up, but don’t fret about things like margins. In short, how something looks is not as important as how something has been designated. ePub files contain styling specifications written in CSS they're designed to allow electronic reading devices to apply their own preferences to books, allowing readers to specify their font styles and sizes. You can spend all afternoon finding the perfect font for your chapter titles, but you’ll be wasting your time. Forget fontsĭon’t worry about how the elements of your document look. Bonus: if you’re copying text from a source that’s already been marked up semantically-say, a web page-then LibreOffice should recognize the styles from the source document and apply them in the target document. Be sure that every heading, every quotation, and every paragraph are properly designated as such. No element in your OpenDocument should be unstructured. These should be set in the "Quotations" style. Some types of writing feature block quotes. It should be designated "Preformatted text." Some text-computer code, most notably-requires special formatting to maintain its spacing. The text of your book should receive the "Text body" style in LibreOffice. Most ePub makers won’t recognize anything but these. The title of the book and its major chapters should be set in "Heading 1." All chapter sections should be set in "Heading 2." For subsections, choose "Heading 3." While LibreOffice allows writers to designate up to nine heading styles, you shouldn’t move beyond the first three. To make an ePub file, you’ll need to designate at least the following elements: When this pane is visible, it will display the styles currently in use in your document. In LibreOffice, press F11 to toggle the Styles and Formatting pane. If you’re one of those people (I was!), then you should do yourself a wonderful favor and study Ahuka’s LibreOffice tutorials on Hacker Public Radio. Unfortunately, most users never learn to use word processing software properly, applying text formatting (like font sizes or text colors) to individual elements willy-nilly. Some might think using a word processor to create electronic books is a bit looney, but here's the thing: quickly and efficiently formatting text is what word processors are designed for. "Styles" are more than font choices and line-height preferences they’re statements about the logical and meaningful structure of your document (for more on this, do some reading on " semantic markup"). Regardless of how you get your content into LibreOffice, remember one crucial point: you must use styles to format your document. In either scenario, LibreOffice makes for an ideal tool. Or maybe you’re repurposing content you’ve already published on a blog. You might be composing fresh content for your eBook project. Preparing contentįirst things first: your eBook needs content. Any open source project worth its salt must acknowledge its debts Scott has my gratitude.Īlright. When I began imagining how I might accomplish this project, I read (several times) many of Scott's outstanding eBook tutorials, which were immensely helpful. One additional note before we begin: I could not have done this work as quickly or as easily without the help of Scott Nesbitt, the Auckland-based writer and editor who's a mainstay at. As a result, this guide describes a rather specific procedure-one for collecting and editing content in the OpenDocument format and turning that content into an ePub eBook. The method I outline here reflects two desires: to create open eBooks in open formats using open tools, and to avoid unnecessary complication by involving as few of these tools as possible. But more importantly, formatting an electronic book as an ePub guarantees that many online eBook marketplaces will host and distribute the work. ePub is the International Digital Publishing Forum's open standard for digital book publishing, and most major electronic reading devices support it (except for the Kindle-sorry, Amazon fans!). This guide explains one method for creating electronic books ("eBooks") in the ePub format using open source tools available on most popular computing platforms. Now, some of our best essays and interviews are available as lightweight and portable files, and can be read on any electronic reading device that supports this open standard.Īnd who better to undertake the task of converting our library than your friendly intern? This summer, I’ve refined what I consider a simple, reliable method for creating eBooks the open source way. Welcome to the communityĪstute readers will have noticed that we’ve begun publishing our "Open Voices" e B ooks in the ePub format.
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