Designing ebooks with free software
If you are publishing an ebook, you can find numerous conversion tools online. The trouble is, most of these tools give you minimal control over the results. Too often, the results are poorly formatted, partly because Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), the language used to format ebooks, is limited, but mainly because automatic formatting is often too inflexible. You have far more control if you do the conversion yourself. Without being an expert, you can produce better ebooks with just two open source tools: LibreOffice Writer and Calibre. However, expect some trial and error before you get the results you want.
Creating an ebook involves these steps:
- Create the raw file in LibreOffice Writer.
- Convert to EPUB format.
- Edit glitches in Calibre.
- Edit CSS directly, if necessary.
- Add finishing touches in Calibre.
[...]
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