Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: Book-writing with Writer

Hi again.

OK. I've been through the eLAIX extension and found it works quite well. I have successfully 
exported the first chapter of the Getting started with LO 4.0 guide (the one titled "Introducing 
LibreOffice"). Main problems I had were:

- eLAIX doesn't like custom styles for headings, I had to change the headings to the standard 
values. I didn't gave them the properties the original document headings had (fonts, colour, etc.) 
but it could be easily done. It's probably useless, though, because most readers would ignore this 
settings. I think Virgil had problems with customized styles with the writer2epub extension too.

- The first item on the lists would display different from the rest, because two different custom 
styles were used to create lists in this ODT: one for the first item and another for the rest of 
the list. Don't know why, but just giving standard list style to all solved the problem.

- For some reason I don't understand, but may be something regarding frames, eLAIX failed to export 
the images embedded in the document. I solved this by extracting the "Pictures" folder from the ODT 
file (I used 7-zip) and then eliminating each image from the original document and inserting it 
again via the macro provided by eLAIX itself to insert pictures. Then, the images were properly 
exported.

- eLAIX creates its own index, so I eliminated the ODT index.

- When opening the epub file in my reader, I found a weird thing about the "figure" fields. These 
are auto-numeric fields used in the captions that follow images, like, let's say: "Figure 1, 
LibreOffice starting window". The number here is introduced as a field (which is wise if one 
doesn't want to keep on updating the captions manually). Well, my reader marked these as links that 
linked to the beginning of the epub. This is not solved in my export. Rough solution, to eliminate 
the field and work the captions manually.

So, my experience with eLAIX is that it would do a pretty good job, but it would take some time and 
effort. By the way, is there a method to make Writer select all the text with a specific style so 
then one can change the style of similar headings at a time? It will reduce a lot of work just to 
tell Write: "take all the text styled as OOoHeader1 and change it into Header 1."

Now, there is another much easier way to export ODT into EPUB, specially if they are well built, 
like is the case with the LO documentation: to pass them through the calibre ( 
http://calibre-ebook.com/ ) converter. I checked this with the full Getting Started Guide. It took 
to it quite an hour and a half in this laptop I'm using (which is not the most powerful one in the 
world) and it gave a reasonably good EPUB. Just two main problems:

- It changes page with each new chapter or sub-chapter, so the epub has more pages than the ODT, 
and all the references in the original text (go to page x") make no sense, though the links will 
still link to the good place. Same thing for the numbers of page in the index. Maybe this can be 
fixed through calibre's configuration, I haven't tried that.

- Some frames are rendered in a way that they don't fit in the reader's screen, so they remain 
partially illegible.

Both these problems could be solved by editing the ODT prior to the calibre exportation, 
eliminating the numbers of page in the references and the index and making the frames smaller.

Conclusion: eLAIX could do the job, is more flexible and works as a part of Writer. Calibre will do 
a more quick and less accurate work, and is third-party software, not related to LibreOffice. 
Still, if one just uses the exporting tools of eLAIX and calibre without any previous editing of 
the ODT files, calibre will come with a much better epub than eLAIX.

But all of this means nothing if you don't check the epubs by yourselves. How can I share them? I'm 
not sure that attaching them to a mail to this list would be the appropriate way. I wait for your 
comments.

Regards,
Joaquín

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