From Pages to epub format
On June 2, in a post entitled Pages to ePub, I evoked the challenge of transforming a novel, written in Pages, into epub format for the iPad device. Over the last week, I've succeeded in carrying out this task completely, in an essentially manual way.
Harrison Ainsworth's excellent tutorial on building epubs, which is perfectly sufficient for the basic stuff, can be found at
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guidehxa72412007.html
The first operation consisted of exporting all my Pages files as pure text. Then I used BBEdit (on my iMac) to insert countless pairs of XHTML tags: basically "p" tags. The steepest learning curve for me (as an enthusiastic Flash developer who hasn't touched HTML for years) was getting the knack of how to write a perfect XHTML-oriented Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file.
Curiously, I was hung up by a trivial obstacle for several days: the necessity of zipping together all my files, to create the final .epub document. Here again, Harrison Ainsworth kindly solved this problem by pointing me to a magic tool (in fact a tiny AppleScript device) that can be found on a MobileRead forum at
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55681
While waiting to buy an iPad, I'm using the Adobe Digital Editions tool on my iMac to display my novel. Finally, the most convenient way of validating the end result consists of using the website at
http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate
So, my 318-page novel is now ready (well, almost ready) to be published. I'm awaiting an ISBN number from the French authorities. And maybe I should get a professional graphics artist to produce a first-class cover illustration. For the moment, I haven't looked into the question of whether Apple will be prepared to accept my novel for their iBooks distribution (since I live in France).
I'm now faced by the following tough question: Should I carry on using Pages as a creative-writing tool, or would I be better off using an ebook-oriented environment right from the start? For the moment, there are two or three significant advantages in using Pages for creative writing: (1) There's no technical barrier between the author and his/her output. (2) I can distribute my stuff conveniently to friends and colleagues in the form of PDF files. (3) I can print out pages on A4 paper, for checking.
As much as I'm really fond of Pages, I'm not sure that these advantages justify the messy operations involved in moving to epub format. Consequently, I fear that I might soon be putting Pages in mothballs… alongside Textures, PageMaker and InDesign.
Harrison Ainsworth's excellent tutorial on building epubs, which is perfectly sufficient for the basic stuff, can be found at
http://www.hxa.name/articles/content/epub-guidehxa72412007.html
The first operation consisted of exporting all my Pages files as pure text. Then I used BBEdit (on my iMac) to insert countless pairs of XHTML tags: basically "p" tags. The steepest learning curve for me (as an enthusiastic Flash developer who hasn't touched HTML for years) was getting the knack of how to write a perfect XHTML-oriented Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) file.
Curiously, I was hung up by a trivial obstacle for several days: the necessity of zipping together all my files, to create the final .epub document. Here again, Harrison Ainsworth kindly solved this problem by pointing me to a magic tool (in fact a tiny AppleScript device) that can be found on a MobileRead forum at
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=55681
While waiting to buy an iPad, I'm using the Adobe Digital Editions tool on my iMac to display my novel. Finally, the most convenient way of validating the end result consists of using the website at
http://www.threepress.org/document/epub-validate
So, my 318-page novel is now ready (well, almost ready) to be published. I'm awaiting an ISBN number from the French authorities. And maybe I should get a professional graphics artist to produce a first-class cover illustration. For the moment, I haven't looked into the question of whether Apple will be prepared to accept my novel for their iBooks distribution (since I live in France).
I'm now faced by the following tough question: Should I carry on using Pages as a creative-writing tool, or would I be better off using an ebook-oriented environment right from the start? For the moment, there are two or three significant advantages in using Pages for creative writing: (1) There's no technical barrier between the author and his/her output. (2) I can distribute my stuff conveniently to friends and colleagues in the form of PDF files. (3) I can print out pages on A4 paper, for checking.
As much as I'm really fond of Pages, I'm not sure that these advantages justify the messy operations involved in moving to epub format. Consequently, I fear that I might soon be putting Pages in mothballs… alongside Textures, PageMaker and InDesign.
iMac, Mac OS X (10.5.8)
