Hi folks,
I've prepped stuff for Kindle before using their own editor, but am interested in folks' processes for Bookapy and general eBook prep.
I now write in Google Docs and have access to Pages on my Mac. I also can hand code markup and all that jazz thanks to internet history that involves a 9600 baud modem.
Suggestions?
I'm also on a Mac. I use Calibre to create my epub, mobi/azw3, and pdf files for Bookapy. I input a docx file into Calibre, but Calibre has many types of files it will accept. I do all my formatting in Word (any paragraph formatted as Header 1 is put in the Table of Contents).
What page size do you do for PDF? My experience with PDF has been about preparing material for printing so that fonts/images/format stays exactly the same. Do you set it to A5 or something?
What page size do you do for PDF? My experience with PDF has been about preparing material for printing so that fonts/images/format stays exactly the same. Do you set it to A5 or something?
PDF scales to the paper size you set at the time of printing. PDF was designed for that with smooth scaling: Portable Document Format. To keep proportions as much as possible you best create your document using the generic International ISO format, for example A4 or A5. It scales exactly to all other A formats and only minimally differs with other formats like legal. The actual printed size differs a little per printer since the printer firmware handles it a little different. Unless you know the exact targeted paper size A4/5 is your best bet. If you have no need to keep each page (length) exactly as created this should work perfectly fine.
For digital reading all bets are off because of the variety in screen sizes and display options of the PDF readers.
What page size do you do for PDF?
I publish for ebooks, not printing. I don't format my PDF for printing. The only reason I even create a PDF file is because Bookapy has it listed as an option.
I publish for ebooks, not printing. I don't format my PDF for printing.
By having my PDF as a Print Ready PDF it means if someone wants to have it printed as a proper book at a later date they have a file they can do that from with a good result.
I use Libre Office to write in a preset 6 x 9 inch US Trade print book format layout. Once I finish the story I save as html, run some scripts to clean out a lot of excess formatting all word processing software put in, then add in my own CSS code and then use Calibre to create the epub from the html file. This gives me a much smaller, cleaner epub and azw3 files. The Libre Office master file is a single click save as a 6 x 9 inch print ready pdf file for both Bookapy and Lulu. I also get cleaner files for SoL.
I've included the process in full detail in my free book on Bookapy
https://bookapy.com/s/8/fiction-writing-and-style-guide