This is a February 21, 2012 revision of this post, which originally appeared September, 23, 2011.

This is one of those posts where I describe something mind-breakingly complex that I did with my computer. The reason I want to post it is so I can find the description after I’ve totally forgotten all the details in six months. Computer knowledge has such a short half-life.

Over time, I’ll also be revising this post directly, as well adding links and ideas to the comments section as the information filters through my head—and as I continue making mistakes. Let the learning process begin!

[As I often do, I’ll be using photo illos with absolutely no connection to the subject at hand. I took these photos at Nick Herbert’s house in Boulder Creek, on a dude ranch in Wyoming, and in the park at Wilder Ranch in Santa Cruz.]

Plan
So suppose I have a document and I want to make it into an ebook.

Amazon will let you submit a DOC, but you are more likely to get the formatting you want if you submit an HTML. Amazon won’t take an EPUB. In practice it seems to work better to send HTML to Amazon, some files I’ve tried had bad indents when I sent DOC, but looked okay in HTML.

Barnes and Noble PubIt will take an HTML or an EPUB. You can convert HTML to EPUB with the Calibre or the Sigil tool.

Lulu will get you on iBook, and they take EPUB.

We’ll need HTML and EPUB versions of our book. So our workflow is to go from DOC to HTML, and then from HTML to EPUB.

[Supposedly Smashwords takes DOC only, but they seem to be becoming a little irrelevant. And, for that matter, they don’t seem to be processing their requests for new accounts. To hell with them.]

Setup

Tools I’m going to use: Microsoft Word, Adobe Dreamweaver, the free Calibre ebook software, the free Sigil epub software, and the free Epubcheck software.

I make a directory for my project and put my Word document in there. It’s important at this point to format all of your chapter or section headings with a Header style such as Header 1, Header 2, etc. The EPUB file is going to want to make a table of contents, and it will build them by finding Header-formatted lines. And you’ll want an internal table of contents that Word generates from headers.

Regarding the images you want to include, even if you inserted them into your Word DOC from somewhere else on your hard drive, put copies of all the images that in a subdirectory of your project directory and name the subdirectory images. Use some photo editing software to adjust the sizes of these images to be, let’s say, 800 pixels across so they can fill up an iPad reader page. This way you have control of what images get used.

Word Formatting

You can adjust font in the ereader, but I go with a default font size of 12 to start with. Don’t use any font larger than about 18 points for titles or sections, or it’ll look too big on a smartphone.

The fonts available in ereaders vary widely. I myself like to go to Georgia. There’s a setting you can do to make the ereader use a similar font if Georgia’s not available. More on this point below.

The Amazon guidelines, and others, suggest that you justify your text, that is, choose the justified paragraph style so that both the left and right edges of the text are in straight columns. I feel your ebook is easier to read if you forget about straight right edges and choose the Flush Left option. Then the spacing between words will be uniform. This said, many ereaders will ignore your format and will justify the text anyway.

Set your paragraph first-line indent fairly small, like 0.2 inches. What you’ll see on the readers again varies. Kindle always puts a huge indent, doesn’t skip a line between paragraphs. Kindle Fire does no indent, skips a line between paragraphs. iPhone does a small indent if you asked for that, doesn’t skip a line. Etc.

Put a Table of Contents into the DOC using the Word automatic TOC. If you’re planning to send an HTML to Amazon, you’ll need the Table of Contents in there, as the Amazon processor won’t build one for you.

If you are heading for EPUB, you’ll be building a Table of Contents from the headers in Calibre or Sigil, but it’s good to have a Table of Contents inside your document anyway. The thing is, some ereaders are unable to show the hidden EPUB table of contents.

Once you have your Word-made TOC, also apply a header style to the title of your book at the beginning, as this will make the EPUB-built TOC more useful. Or you can do this later in Sigil.

Cover

For the cover of your Ebook, use an external photo editor to create a cover.jpg file which is about 600 pixels by 800 pixels high. The cover obviously should show your name and the title of the book. Save it in your images mages subdirectory. In World use Insert|Picture to insert this image at the very start of your DOC.

If you want you can have a bigger version of your cover as well. When you upload to Amazon or B&N, they’ll as for a cover image, and you can upload the same one you use in the book or you can upload the bigger one.

Converting DOC to HTML

In Word, I save the Word file as a “Web Page, Filtered” or filtered HTML file. Filtered means there’s less Word crap in the file. And I open this file in Dreamweaver and use Commands | Clean Up Word HTML… to get rid of more Word crap. When I save the “Filtered HTML” file, Word makes a directory of extra files in my directory, but there’s actually nothing in that directory that matters, and you can delete it.

While you’re in HTML, look at the image links, and make sure they all point to file-names to the images subdirectory that you made. You may need to use the Edit | Find and Replace dialog to get things set.

You’ll have at least one image, your cover. It’s better not have the size of the images hardcoded. That way you’re free to force in larger images if you want. Use the Edit | Find and Replace dialog and for the Search: field select Specific Tag and set to img, then for the Action: field select Remove Attribute and set to width. Then do the same for height. Then do the same for border.

Fill in the Title field for your HTML in Dreamweaver.

Now we need a few more tweaks so that the HTML can be used to build an EPUB.
*Delete the body attributes link and vlink.
*Remove all the align attributes of the p tags
*Remove all the clear attributes of the br tags
*Search and replace to change every occurrence of a name= to a id= . These are the anchor tags that make your Word-built Table of contents work. The Epub standard likes the id attribute but not the name attribute, and either one works.

Your probably want to add some separators between your sections, especially at the start of the book. HTML runs all the pages together. To make a separator, at the top of your HTML file, inside the style block of definitions, add this line
hr {page-break-after:always;}

And then, wherever you want a break in your document, insert the symbol < then the letters hr then the symbol >, and you get a nice looking line like below, which plays the role of a page break. I can’t write out what you actually put, because then you just get the pagebreak line!

Cautionary note: Once you get your HTML file all tweaked, you’d better not save it from Word again, as Word may put in some of the crap that you just removed. I’m not positive about this, but at some point it seems safer to do any further edits in Dreamweaver.

Sending HTML to Amazon

I won’t go into the details about getting a KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) account, and filling out all the dialogs. Let’s talk about how you send the file to Amazon. You’ll have an HTML file and a directory with some files, in particular with the image files (Word makes some files, but they don’t matter). In order to upload, I put my main HTML file and the directory with the images into a single zipped directory file and uploaded that and the Kindle meat grinder eats that fine. To zip the file and directory in my Windows machine I I highlighted them and right clicked and selected Send To and sent to a Compressed File.

Tweaking HTML and EPUB in Sigil

So now you’ve made an HTML file and cleaned it up. Open the HTML in Sigil. As soon as you open you file in Sigil, it’s converted into an EPUB file that you can save and distribute. But first do some tweaks.

Use the menu item View to put check marks on Book Browser and Table of Contents.
The Book Browser shows all the different components that are hidden inside your EPUB file.

The Table of Contents window should show a Table of Contents. You can create a Table of Con-tents by clicking Generate TOC from Headings, and then clicking OK in the Heading Selector. You can see if it worked by double clicking on some of the items in the Table of Contents box.

If you didn’t format your book title as a header in Word, you can still do that here in Sigil. Select the title and use the drop-down menu on the upper left corner of the Sigil window and apply a format such as Heading1.

Use the menu item Tools|MetaEditor… to fill in names for the Title, Author, and Language of your EPUB file.

In the Book Browser window in the left hand side of your Sigil window, find the Images directory and look for contents.jpg in there. Right click on it, select Add Semantics, and check Cover Image.

Now before you save and distribute your EPUB, use the Sigil Tools|Validate EPUB selection to see if you get errors. If you click on the error messages, you’ll see source code for the HTML, showing where the error lies.

If you don’t understand an error message paste it into the Google search box.

Fix all the changes, but do the fixes over in Dreamweaver, and then save the HTML and reload it in Sigil. You need the roundabout approach, as Sigil won’t save HTML for you. And it’s good to have the fixed HTML as a kind of base code file.

Once you get past the errors, save your EPUB file with a name with no spaces.

Validating with Epubcheck.
Install the Epubcheck ware on your computer, it probably ends up in Program Files\Epubcheck. Make a sample subdirectory of the Epubcheck directory and put a copy of your current EPUB file there. Suppose it’s called betterworlds.epub.

Then go to the Command Line interface for your computer, navigate into the directory where epubcheck lives, like to Program Files\Epubcheck. Now run a command like this:
java -jar epubcheck-3.0b2.jar sample/betterworlds1.epub

Of course the letters and numbers after epubcheck depend on which version of the software you have. And the name of the epub file depends on what file you’re checking.

If all goes well, epubcheck will either print a “No Errors Found” message, or it will spew out a lot of error messages. You can scroll up and down to see them all. Most common causes of errors are (1) you forgot to build a table of contents using the Sigil Table of Contents window, or (2) you didn’t fill in the Name, Title and Language fields using Sigil Meta tool, or (3) the Epub ware is confused because you gave your epub file a name with spaces in it. If you see an error you can’t understand, try copying into the Google search bar to see what other people say about it.

As before, do the fixes in Dreamweaver, save the fixed HTML, reload in Sigil, save off a fresh PUB and try epubcheck again.

Publish on Amazon and B&N

And maybe Lulu, as a way to get to iBook. And if Smashwords ever starts working again, maybe try that…if you care about being listed on the smaller distribuor sites like Diesel.

A new painting today.

“Rigging,” by Rudy Rucker, 20 x 16 inches, September, 2011, Oil on canvas.” Click for a larger version of the picture.

The reflections of sailboat rigging fascinate me. I took some photos for this painting during the same session where I started Santa Cruz Harbor. Back home I copied one of the photos for this oil painting. I put on quite a few layers, and used a gel medium to emphasize the brush strokes on the masts and lines.

As usual, you can get prints or originals of my paintings at my paintings site.

I made a new edition of Better Worlds on Lulu, with all eighty-six of my paintings thus far.

The eBook business is an ever-changing maze. I set up a page with information about links for getting eBook editions of my works. You’ll notice a link to this page in the upper right corner of my blog. Feel free to suggest corrections via the comments on that page.

We spent four nights with daughter Isabel at the Darwin Ranch, a 160 acre resort along the Gros Ventre River in the midst of the Bridger National Forest, between Pinedale and Jackson, Wyoming, not far from the Grand Tetons. “Grand Tetons” means “large breasts,” and “Gros Ventre” means “plump belly.” One thinks of lonely French explorers. We dropped off dog Rivers and hit the road.

The Darwin Ranch has some fairly simple log cabins and a lodge house where the twenty guests met for cocktail hour, meals, and after-dinner hanging out.

It’s located in a valley gouged out by the narrow and snaky Gros Ventre River—more of a creek than a river. Two sides of the valley are lined with sheer red bluffs. The upstream end of the valley slopes up into a forest with a waterfall.

A fabulous place—160 acres going up for auction at Hall and Hall realtors with a starting price of $4 million on September 13. In a way, it’s a modest sum, the price of a McMansion in California!

The ranch has about twenty horses for the guests to ride—it’s a dude ranch, but in a fairly mellow way. The place has a bit of a hippie feel, even though all of the guests (other than our daughter and her husband) looked to be in their fifties, sixties or even seventies. That’s the horse Alice that I rode one day up there.

As it happens the man who owns the Darwin Ranch is Loring Woodman, a cousin of my friend Howard Swann, a colorful and voluble mathematician with whom I worked at San Jose State. Howard and his wife Anita were at the ranch with us—it was good to have some comfortable old friends to chat with. Howard has an extravagant, playful style of speech. He goes for odd phrasings, recondite words, and unusual rhythms, sounding a bit like the W. C. Fields. That’s a picture of Howard and me. One of Howard’s proudest achievements is his cartoon-illustrated McSquared’s Calculus Primer.

Isabel actually worked as the winter caretakers at the Darwin Ranch some years ago, and they’ve stopped by for visits a number of times over the years. It was a treat for them to be actual guests. On the first day we four hiked along the top of Sportsman’s Ridge, a slanting red bluffs that bounds the north side of the valley.

We had an amazing view of the Gros Ventre River’s meanders across the valley, making a shape in every way like that of a rivulet of water you might see flowing down your car windshield. The second day I went on a four hour horse-riding expedition with Isabel, and our old friend Howard Swann. I’d never ridden a horse before, but the others coached me. My horse Alice was quite docile, and although not particularly interested in me as an individual. She carries riders several times a week.

Heading up the two-thousand-foot rise to the top of Bacon Ridge, I noticed a large raven in a tree. I remembered a particular fairy-tale scene I loved when I was growing up. A boy is the helper of a wizard. They’re travelling across the countryside, and the wizard manages to shoot a particular raven with his bow. The wizard tells the boy to build a fire and roast the raven’s heart for him, giving the boy particular instructions that he mustn’t taste the tiniest fragment of the heart until the wizard has had the first bite. The wizard lies down for a nap and the boy gets to work. The raven’s heart sizzles over the flame, and piece of hot fat lands on they boy’s finger, burning it.. The boy puts the finger to his mouth, licking it to soothe the pain. And in that instant he receives the magic power that lay in the raven’s heart: he can understand the speech of birds and animals.

Somehow this episode has always held a special meaning for me. When my son Rudy was young, I’d discuss this story with him, and when we’d bring a roast holiday turkey to the table, we’d compete to tear off and devour a scrap of the golden skin and say to the other, “Now I understand the speech of birds and animals.” Seeing the raven the Wyoming woods, I began thinking that I might use the old fairy-tale trope in a short story or in the start of a novel this fall.

We rode up through pines and aspens, up through the late-summer-yellow fields, up to the bare windy peak of Bacon’s Ridge. It felt like a once-in-a-lifetime adventure to me. Over and over my horse Alice would grab bites of the trail-side vegetation—she was particularly fond of a certain enormous thistle plant that fills a human’s hand with prickers if touched. It wasn’t all that hard to stay on the horse, although I was definitely clutching the saddle-horn at times, and bracing my feet against the stirrups—particularly on the way back downhill. The whole process of riding a saddle on a large animal felt very ancient, very highly evolved.

The third day on the ranch, Sylvia, Isabel and I hiked through the forest along the base of the Sportsman’s Ridge bluffs. Eventually we three reached Ouzel Falls, which is a very steeply slanting rapids rather than a proper waterfall—it’s a bit like a hundred-yard water slide, seething with white foam. Some small diving birds called water ouzels frequent the pool at the falls’ base, thus the name.

Before we’d set out on our hike, Loring had urged us to make a loop of the hike by clambering to the top of Sportsman’s Ridge near Ouzel Falls and taking the high road home. Sylvia didn’t want to add on the extra climbing, so Isabel walked back to the Ranch with her while I pressed on alone.

I was quite tired by now, in part due to the thin air at the eight or nine thousand foot altitude. I was hot, and my water supply was fairly low—even though Isabel had kindly given me the rest of her own water. Starting up the steep path alone, I was a little anxious that my heart or my brain might suddenly malfunction, leaving me to die alone in the wilderness. But I was determined to press on.
In the old days, I’d very often taken long and risky hikes alone. But I hadn’t done a hike like that for something like five years—I think the last one was in August, 2006, in Glacier National Park.
I lost the trail twice in gullies, found it again both times, and after an hour I was up on the top of the bluff. The High Path. I felt wonderful. On top of the world. Just like old times.

It was a good feeling to have pushed past the fear and done something physically audacious once again. I felt more wholly well than I’d felt in quite some time. A wonderful day.

After Wyoming, I went on to Wisconsin to visit my other daughter Georgia.

In the mornings, I often read my grandson his favorite (that week) book, Hogwash, no words, just lots of pix of little pigs wallowing and romping in mud and paint—and then being herded and washed by slightly sinister pig-mothers. My grandson is a cuddly bundle. He reminds me very much of the childhood photos of myself. I’m exceedingly fond of him and my Wisconsin granddaughter.