Pimp my Aether

[Snorkel]

For people who find it annoying to read a docx file on their computer, I thought I'd share the things I did to make my copy more readable. I hope some of you find this helpful to your own enjoyment of this book.

(Still for personal use only, of course)

Feel free to share other ideas/ things you did to your copy!

(just don't share your actual copy)

******************************************************

Start off by downloading Calibre.

Once you've installed and loaded Calibre, go to the "Add Books" icon and import the aether .docx file.

Now select your book and click the big "Convert books" button. In the top right of the new screen is a drop down box where you can select a format to convert to.  Edit: Mobi is the kindle-friendly format, epub is readable by just about everything else.

If you need mobi for you kindle - and you just want to read now, then select mobi. If you want to edit it some more first, then select epub now, and then convert to mobi after you're happy with your edits.

While you're on this screen, you'll notice the "Title" field near top right is filled with "Aether Ch", so here you can change that to "Aether of Night".  If you want to import a cool picture to use as the cover, you can Browse and add that on this screen also. Pick OK and convert your book!

If you missed the cover/title options when converting and want to go back to that, you're looking for the "Edit metadata" button. This screen also gives you an option to generate a cover image.

I'll include some optional tweaking next, but you should have a converted book at this point that you can just go and read!  Your finished book will be by default in documents/Calibre Library/[author name]/[book name] on Windows.  But in the right-size pane of the main Calibre window you'll see "Path: Click to open", and clicking that link will take you straight to your ebook.

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Optional tweaks - Select your book and press the big "Edit book" button

Making your cover picture not stretched - If you imported a cover picture, go to Tools > Add cover, select the image, make sure "preserve aspect ratio" tick box is ticked and press OK.  Done!

Filling in the table of contents 

(Edited: found the better way to do this.)

Go to the Tools menu and pick "Table of Contents" > "Edit Table of Contents".

Then click on each one in order and type in a name. You can press tab to go to the next name.  With the current entries, the top is Introduction & Prologue, then Chapter 1...through to Chapter 27. For some reason there is no Chapter 28, so the second to last is Chapter 29, then the final entry is Epilogue.

You can go to the "View" menu and tick the "Table of Contents" box to open a Contents Pane. Then click the items in that, and check that the correct chapter is showing in the Preview Pane.

Killing the underlined bits - personally I found the underlined sections very annoying to read! I changed it to italic.

(Edited: found the better way to do this , wow calibre is amazing)

Go to the Tools menu and pick "transform styles".

Click the "Add rule" button.  

Fill it in like this:

Then Add rule a second time for this:

Make sure the "Remove the property" is second on the rules list.

Press OK, it will come up with a box showing the changes.  Close that box.

If you think everything is OK, save and quit.  If not, you can quit without saving and try again. Also, under the Edit menu you'll find some "revert" options to undo whatever you just did.  You can click on html files in the File browser pane and view them in the Preview pane to see how it's looking.  There is some underlined text in the 2nd paragraph of "index_split_02.html", if you want to preview how that operation has gone before saving.

Edited September 23, 2020 by Snorkel

[Treamayne]

Here's some other ideas/options:

All of the below are accomplished in Calibre by converting to epub, then opening the book for editing (right click the book > Edit Book)

Separate the Introduction from the Prologue:

• Open the Introduction file (make sure the File preview is on in View > File Preview)
• Scroll to the Prologue header in the file preview.
• The third icon on the left (looks like a piece of paper with and up and down arrow in the center) is the split button, click on that 
• The click just above the Prologue Header (you will see a line showing the Split location)
• Now your prologue is a separate "file" from the introduction

Fixing the headers:

• You can use find/replace (CTRL+F) to remove the book title header portion, collapsing the header to one Chapter Line per file
  • Find: <h1 class="block_3" id="toc_id_[0-9]+">The Aether of Night</h1>  <p class="block_4">Chapter
  • Replace: <h1 class="block_3">Chapter
  • You will also need to find/replace the </p> at the end of each Chapter line with </h1>
• This will allow you to use the next Table of Contents tweak

Table of Contents

• Open the ToC editor (6th icon from right, next to "spell check", looks like a finger pointing at lines of text)
• CTRL+A (select all
• Delete
• Click "Generate ToC from Files"
• This willl create a Table of Contents based on each file's header and already labelled as that header

CSS

• I retained <body class="calibre"> as the body
• I changed all of the paragraphs to <p class="calibre1">
  • I used <p class="calibre1r"> for Right aligned text
• I changed all of the underlined portions to <span class="ital">
• I used <p class="block_1"> for empty lines
• I used <h1 class="block_3"> for the headers
• I used <p class="block_4"> for the scene breaks

Spoiler

.block_ {
  display: block;
  line-height: 2;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
.block_1 {
  display: block;
  line-height: 2;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
.block_3 {
  display: block;
  font-size: 1.5em;
  font-weight: bold;
  line-height: 2;
  page-break-after: avoid;
  text-align: center;
}
.block_4 {
  display: block;
  line-height: 2;
  text-align: center;
  margin-top: 0.75em;
  margin-bottom: 0.75em;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  padding: 0;
}
.calibre {
  display: block;
  font-family: "Courier New", monospace;
  font-size: 1em;
  padding-left: 0;
  padding-right: 0;
  margin: 0 5pt;
}
.calibre1 {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0.3em;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-right: 0;
  text-indent: 1.5em;
}
.calibre1r {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
  text-align: right;
  margin-top: 1em;
  margin-bottom: 0.5em;
  margin-left: 0;
  margin-right: 4em;
  text-indent: 1.5em;
.tab {
  white-space: pre-wrap;
}
.text_ {
  text-decoration: underline;
}
.ital {
  font-style: italic;
}

 

 

Edited January 24, 2023 by Treamayne
Testing - Test Complete