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Ask Slashdot: Composing an e-Book With a Couple of Bells and Whistles
New submitter Cbhihe writes: I want to edit an e-book, a scientific textbook to be distributed on the Kindle tablet to be exact. The book is written. For that I used LibreOffice.
It comes complete with index, drawings, pictures, formulae and its present look and feel is no different from the majority of scientific text, you might be accustomed to browsing. I need advice for the next step, which consists in making this digital pile of data suitable for an e-book.. with a slight twist. The e-book should allow for:
— picture zoom-in in pop-ups on screen
— allow in-text basic interactivity, e.g. when in a exercise, multiple answers are proposed, each answer when clicked should display "Right" or "Wrong" (for instance).
Can you recommend, if not a commercial package that allows such features right out of the box, then at least and preferably open-source technology needed for me to achieve what I want ? I am willing to get down to moderate programming to use your suggested solution. I am conversant in C, C++ and getting there with Python.
It comes complete with index, drawings, pictures, formulae and its present look and feel is no different from the majority of scientific text, you might be accustomed to browsing. I need advice for the next step, which consists in making this digital pile of data suitable for an e-book.. with a slight twist. The e-book should allow for:
— picture zoom-in in pop-ups on screen
— allow in-text basic interactivity, e.g. when in a exercise, multiple answers are proposed, each answer when clicked should display "Right" or "Wrong" (for instance).
Can you recommend, if not a commercial package that allows such features right out of the box, then at least and preferably open-source technology needed for me to achieve what I want ? I am willing to get down to moderate programming to use your suggested solution. I am conversant in C, C++ and getting there with Python.
You want to publish an e-book but you also want to be able to do things that e-books can't do.
If you want equations to come out reasonably, you have to use EPUB 3 or iBooks Author (which isn't open source). The problem you're going to find with EPUB 3 is that most readers don't support it yet, and you might have to distribute it yourself. I have a small publishing company and we recently did a book full of equations and ended up publishing it only on iTunes/iBooks and our own site. It has the equations done in MathML so you can copy and paste them into other things. Most of your other features are things we haven't tried to implement, but I suspect will cause the old EPUB 2.x validators to barf (even if it's valid EPUB 2, many distributors are using old validators).
As far as tools, we tend to export things from Indesign (because a lot of our books are in dead tree format, too) and then fix them up with BBEdit, TextMate, or Sigil. Sigil is nice because it will render the book for you. BBEdit will open a properly zipped up epub file package and let you hand edit things inside, but it doesn't do any of the cross-file updating that Sigil does (e.g. if you change a file name it will get updated where appropriate in Sigil, but you have to do it by hand in BBEdit). TextMate doesn't open epub packages directly, but it's useful as an editor (and any other text editor with regex support will serve you about the same). BBEdit and TextMate both have good regex support (more so than Sigil). I'm partial to BBEdit, while our other editor is partial to TextMate. We have a little "tech tips" section on our main site that describes how we export a word file and make an epub from it (it should be about the same with OO), as well as how we do references. Unfortunately there aren't any good epub editors available yet that support references in a reasonable way. Assuming you can figure out the EPUB 3 implementation of the features you want, you should be able to do most of what you need with a good text editor that has good regex support.
You can run your final product through Epubcheck 3 (or whatever version you want) and verify that it's valid. Most distributors use some flavor of epubcheck 2.x and will reject it if your file throws any errors. They may or may not accurately tell you the errors, and like any compiler, you can sometimes fix 30 pages of errors by putting in the correct bit of punctuation just before where the first error is thrown.
The Kindle ebooks doesn't do what you're asking for. So either drop the Kindle ebook requirement or abandon those interactive features. My recommended alternative would be a small website. If the hardware has a basic web browser with JavaScript support what you want is trivially doable. FWIW a TiddlyWiki would be very appropriate; self-contained, portable, your content can be easily adapted to it, and extensible for your needs.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
(1) Kindles and (much better) e-books don't do that. You might as well have asked for a flying pogo-stick.
(2) You may be confusing pop-up with box-out or even foot-note. If you want the 'less accomplished' to keep up then you can't do it with pop-ups[1] Instead write two books.
(3) An e-book reader is not a multi-media volcano of goodness. The opposite: A constrained text reader with occasional images and no character.
[Footnote 1] Note that a box-out remains in clear view forever. A pop-up vanishes after first use, so after being shown it isn't there for re-reference. A footnote a diversion for someone with a particular interest.
epub is HTML + CSS + images + some metadata files (e.g. the table of contents) in a .zip file (with filename 'extension' .epub rather than .zip).
Libreoffice can export to HTML, which will get the bulk of the job done. Then the OP could use Sigil (http://sigil-ebook.com/ - packaged for several linux distros including Debian) to edit the HTML into shape as an epub book.
I've never written a book using Sigil, but I have used it many times to fix problems with bought epubs - hard-coded tiny crappy fonts, missing or broken Table of Contents and other suckage.
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Zooming images etc is something that is not the OP's responsibility - that task (and all other presentation tasks) are handled by the reader's epub viewer program - e.g. whatever the default is on Kindle, plus FBReader, Moon Reader, Cool Reader and many more on Android, and whatever epub viewers run on ipads etc.
FBReader and Calibre and others on Linux PCs, and Windows and Mac too (plus they probably have many more).