Comments on: Take pride in your eBook formatting (Part VIII)

By: Cat

Cat — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:22:02 +0000

Oh brother. I may have jumped the gun. The questions Calibre asked were for the setup, not the actual conversion of books. I apologize – please ignore my last question, and I’ll return if I have further problems!

By: Cat

Cat — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 20:20:13 +0000

Thank you! And hopefully this will be the final question: I’m ready to do a test run of Calibre, using my current ebook draft. I just downloaded the latest version into my Macbook Pro.

The very first thing Calibre has asked me to do is to “choose my device.” I don’t see an “Add Books” button. Here is my problem: there are two panes labeled “Manufacturers” and “Devices” if I click, for example, Barnes and Noble in the left pane, it brings up 3 choices in the right pane, with the top item, “Nook Color,” selected. Is this a new development for Calibre? Does this mean I will have to create 3 different ebook formats for 3 different Nooks? I’m a bit distressed that our choices are not of formats, but of devices.

There’s also an item marked “Generic” in the “Manufacturers” list, with 3 choices for devices: “Generic e-ink device,” “Smartphone,” and “iPad like tablet.” I wonder whether it would be advisable to use these 3 formats and bypass specific devices altogether. Do you have any sage advice? Again, thanks!

By: Guido

Guido — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:49:53 +0000

Yes, Calibre can do that. There is no limitation what you can call your chapters. All you have to do is put it in the proper place. In my examples, this would mean wrapping it with tags like this

This can be your chapter title

If you instruct Calibre to use the tags that are of the “chapter” style to generate the TOC, you will see that it automatically takes your text form between the tags and inserts it into the TOC.

By: Cat

Cat — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 23:31:29 +0000

Fantastic! I have not used em on a regular basis, but I’m aware that it’s the way to go. Thank you.

I hope you don’t mind an additional question, while I have your attention:

Can Calibre use the chapter titles in the TOC, rather than “Chapter 1,” etc.? Will Calibre allow me to direct it to list entire headings in the TOC as links to the various chapters? Also, can I change the decoration on a link to eliminate the underlining, perhaps even changing the color of the text when the cursor hovers over the link?

Again, thanks for your invaluable advice.

By: Guido

Guido — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:58:03 +0000

You can use width as an attribute in the image styles, yes. However, I do not recommend the use of percentages, because the image will scale to humungous proportions on a computer screen, while still being small on a cell phone screen, for example.

The way about scaling images properly is to use em. Define how much you want the image to be by adding width:30em; to the img style, for example, and you’ll find the image displays properly proportioned on any device.

By: Cat

Cat — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 22:27:53 +0000

Hi Guido – it’s now 2013, and your tutorial is still as amazing as it was when you first put it up. I’m about to create my ebook, but I wanted to address the last question by the last commenter on this page, Mark, by asking a question of my own:

I wonder whether it would be possible to use a width attribute in the img tag, with a percentage in the value – something like width=”80%” or some such. Do you think an application, regardless of which device it’s on, would interpret this properly? I’m also wondering what width an image used as a chapter heading, like in the example you showed us in a previous installment, I should use so that it fits neatly onto a smartphone screen, like my iPhone.

Thank you so much for this amazing resource!

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 19:06:25 +0000

Guido,

Thank you for this awesome guide!

I was just wondering…
I have some illustrations in my book and I sized them at 550 pixels wide according to your recommendation in one of your posts. However when I view them in Explorer, or Firefox or Calibre, they are way way too large. What should I do? Is 550 pixels the correct size? And what should the
resolution be? 72?

By: Kelly

Kelly — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 02:36:21 +0000

Thank you so much for your help. I am working through it and making some progress. Originally, I had put it in an Epub file. Created several tables (with text). How do I format that? When I put it in text mate, it just shows the text.

By: Guido

Guido — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:54:01 +0000

Most of the time there is very easy what to check the validity of the document. In TextMate simply press option-command-. This will try to close all currently open tags and if all is well, at the end of the document you should be able to do this and the program should generate a tag. This is a clear indicator that your tags are not out of order anywhere in the code.

By: Paul

Paul — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 14:34:20 +0000

This is not a question but maybe this will help others. After I brought my Word document into my html editor, I ran a validation on the code. I found multiple instances of the {/i} tag falling outside the closing {/p} tag, which I then cleaned up manually.

I would definitely suggest running a validation on your code to find some of those errors.

This also flagged the error for having a missing {html} tag which is not an error as you explained above.