From: DJ Vollkasko (DJ_Vollkasko_at_gmx.net)
Date: Wed Nov 16 2005 - 12:36:40 PST
Subject: [NTLK] BookMaker help
From: Alex_Le? <alexleao () gmail ! com>
Date: 2005-11-15 5:26:23
> Hello guys in special de BookMakers!
>
> I=B4m trying to do some NewtonBooks with BookMaker for Mac. I read ALL
> the manual and the 101 TXT.
Very good! Hmh, if they are public domain or Creative Commons licensed
or
otherwise explicitely declared "free", then I'd be more than happy to
host
the finished ebooks in the Newton Temporary Library!
[...]
> Are there anybody here that successfuly generate a Newton Book using
> BookMaker for Mac? What's the trick?
Hmh, don't know. Dan's Bookmaking tutorial and the other one somebody
wrote
couple more years ago (IIRC both linked off the Wiki, so check there
for the
Making Ebooks page) are pretty good. I'd twiddled with Bookmaker about
two
years ago when we discussed multi-format ebooks, but that didn't really
work
for me, though Dan sure made some great progress in that direction.
Boy, how
I wish that were a real possibility at last! And Bookmaker has SO many
cool
features to design stuff that is more like an application than a mere
book
(haven't seen anybody applying that in ages, though... would be great to
have more folks exploring that)! The trick is somewhere there, I'm
sure, but
Dan hasn't found it yet...
...until then, I'm using Newton Press, both on Mac OS X in Classic and
on
Windows. Any newbie and their granny can use this!
For text-only books it works really nice and pretty quick if you
pre-process the book in a text processor (batch-removing breaks the
Woody-way, setting font to 14 pt. bold for max readability w/o backlight
even under mediocre lighting situations, adding nice cover sheet in 36
or 24
pt., adding page breaks and centering headings, then saving as .rtf)
before
importing to Press--where you only have to generate the table of
contents,
add any pictures and fill the detailed title card before you can creae a
good-looking, well legible book you can be proud of.
The only time this doesn't work is when copying text from html pages
and
some dreadful hidden formatting (e.g. URL-link) survives in the rtf (and
converting to txt-only and back to drop that sometimes is no option as
it
would lose also all italicized, bold or text-centered formatting...).
Importing such a file to Press (File/Add) results in a stalled import.
You might want to try Press, too.
Oh, and talking about rtf and Bookmaker: Dan mentioned that not all
rtf-versions are created equal. Some text processors create rtf which
is not
accepted by Bookmaker, he said. Might be incompatibility, might be some
unobserved formatting as I'd encountered in Press. I suggest to also
try a
variety of text processors, maybe NeoOffice (native OpenOffice-port for
the
Mac w/o X11). Or perhaps you still have an old version of WordPerfect
or MS
Word for Classic, that should do the job.
Pls. let us know if any of this helped you. Good luck for your book
making!
'Kasko
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
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