mcgrew's Journal: Well. that mess is cleaned up.

It was a bigger mess than I thought. Yesterday's Tomorrows looked fine on an e-reader on the computer, but when I bought that tablet I discovered it was really messed up in MobiSystems' Universal Book Reader (UB Reader). Not only was the table of contents hosed, but there were no indents on paragraph beginnings, and it was an ugly sans serif font rather than the Gentium Book Basic in the printed volumes and HTML (at least on a computer with that font installed, if not it falls back to Times New Roman).

It was, of course, from my own ignorance, both of e-books in general and Calibre in particular. I never had any interest in e-books, because you paid for something you didn't own. If I buy a book I can give it away or sell it, it's a physical thing. Not so with e-books, and the e-books usually cost as much as the paperback.

But since I was giving books away I needed to learn about them. I wish I'd bought a tablet a long time ago. At any rate, I finally got all of them straightened out. At least, I think I have, except I can'tseem to get the cover to show in the Kindle version of Mars, Ho!, and I'm still checking out the epubs in the Nook app.

There's still a few minor annoyances in Yesterday's Tomorrows. Images that are supposed to fill the page don't on a tablet. I experimented with changing the page size to 12x20 in Open Office and scaling the images, but it came out the same. Maybe I need to raise the resolution?

Reading the HTML on a phone gives no serifs. It appears that Android devices are almost devoid of fonts, from what I've googled about it. Time Magazine seems to somehow have a Times font. I'll get it eventually.

Meanwhile, I documented the steps needed with Calibre. I'll need it, since I likely won't be using that program until next year when I finish Voyage to Earth and Other Stories.

Simpler solution

[BarbaraHudson]

How to use an extension to libreoffice to convert odf, doc, docx to epub [opensource.com] with no drm

It works, and you can do what you want with the resulting files. Handy little sucker. Of course, font styles are governed by the ereader you use ...

A lot easier to use than calibre.

Re:

[mcgrew]

Wrier2epub was the first tool I tried, and it was woefully inadequate. Plus, it appears that I would still need Calibre to convert the epub to azw3.

Re:

[BarbaraHudson]

It may have been woefully inadequate in the past, but it seems to work now. epub is the open standard. Sure, use caliber to convert, but just use openoffice for the original, rather than trying to hand code the special pages, cover, table of contents, etc.

sounds like a huge PITA <eom>

[Bill Dawg]

n/t