The quick start guide is something I’ve been neglecting for quite some time. When calibre 1.0 was released I really should have updated the guide at that time but I didn’t. This past week I decided that it had been long enough and the guide had to be updated. I’m happy to say that before I updated it, the majority of the information in the guide still applied. This is a testament to the stability of calibre....
About Formatting Tips. This is a very easy formatting type and is similar to doing a drop cap. The big difference is a raised initial the letter is on the base line and is higher than the other letters. Only the first letter of the first paragraph of a chapter should be raised. Simply wrap the first letter in a span tag referencing the appropriate CSS class like so. <p><span class="ri">L</span>orem....
About Formatting tips. Many non-fiction books utilize footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes do not work very well with ebooks because footnotes need to be placed at the bottom of a page. It is possible with EPUB to specify content to be shown at the bottom of a page using the following: <div style="display: oeb-page-foot">...</div> I highly recommend against using the oeb-page-foot display style. Many reading devices and software do not support this and just ignore this text....
About Formatting Tips. When dealing with the EPUB format there are number of ways to deal with sizes. Font size, indent, margin, spacing all allow for a variety of units to define their size. Sizes can be defined using any of the following: %, in, cm, mm, em, ex, pt, pc, px. With all these choices it might be hard to decide which unit type to use. This decision is actually very easy....
About Formatting Tips. Up to this point Formatting Tips have been focused on the EPUB format and working directly with the underlying XHTML and CSS. Not everyone wants or needs this level of control over the layout of their book. Often times a book only needs basic formatting such as headings, bold, and italic. There are other easier ways to format an ebook. However, in this case simpler does mean basic....
About Formatting Tips. Calibre’s robust conversion engine can be leveraged to help with formatting tasks. Converting with calibre helps when you are dealing with a format you cannot easily edit, or a format you aren’t very familiar. It’s also helpful in situations where the insides of the file is such as mess it’s hard to understand. Many of these tasks are geared toward people who already have an ebook in an existing format that they need to clean up....
The Barnes and Noble (B&N) Nook has issues reading covers for EPUB files. Not all Nooks have this issue it’s only the Color and Touch because the original Nook supported reading the cover from an external image file. The Color and Touch will only read covers from the EPUB files themselves (no cover thumbnails unfortunately). This issue with the Nook is caused by B&N not properly implementing the EPUB specification in their device....
About Formatting Tips. Poetry is one of the hardest elements to get right when formatting an ebook. The biggest issue is poems visually use a fixed width. Each line needs to be easily distinguishable. If they run together the rhyming and meter can easily be thrown off. Ebooks typically allow for reflowable text. This is where the text on screen changes to accommodate the users selected font, font size, and the screen size....
About Formatting Tips. There are two types of scene breaks: hard and soft. Hard scene breaks are denoted by a visual separator between paragraphs. Typical identifiers are lines and stars. Soft scene breaks are created by putting white space between paragraphs. They both serve the same purpose but some authors prefer one style over the other. Lets start by setting a style to create print formatted paragraphs. This makes seeing the distinction in the scene breaks easier....
About Formatting Tips. A common embellishment used in print books is to have the first letter of the first paragraph in a chapter appear much larger then the others. In addition to the letter being larger than the rest it also falls below the baseline. The rest of the paragraph will wrap around this first letter. To achieve this we will use a little bit of CSS and a span tag....