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Digital book #general
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Shimy Karni
Hello,
After a year of my family research I want to create a digital book with all the findings I had gathered in an MSword document. I thought of a digital book as it will be easier to distribute to the all my family relatives. Does anyone have an advise for a prefared tool. Thanks, Shimi Karni |
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Harvey Kaplan
In my experience over the years, no sooner than you make a fancy book, you will receive or discover further material and the book will need to be revised. It's a price worth paying! The advantage, of course, of a digital book is that the updating is easily done. I use MS Word for my various family history books and nowadays, Word has all the versatility I need. Once I create a new version - which is always a big size because of all the images - I save it as a pdf version (takes seconds) and that makes it easier to email. I imagine that the fancier programmes for books are more important if the book is to be printed out, but even then, you can always print from pdf. Harvey Kaplan Glasgow, Scotland |
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herbst@...
Try to do it in LaTeX (www.tug.org): it is an open source collection of programs used by major publishers as well; and it it a potent tool, much better suited for publication purposes than Word. It allows you also to structure your workflow, and it produces pdf as an output (or html, XML). You will find (under the webpage www.tug.org ) als the necessary tutorials (for whatever platform you work with (Windows, Mac, Linux).
LaTeX is not (like Word) a Wysiwyg program. It works with an editor (various), and it uses commands and style sheets to typeset the text. This double text (commands plus text) is than processed (quickly). You can get the knack of it within few hours: it pays off well, producing beautiful text! I work on a Mac platform, use TeXShop as my editor, as well as XeLaTeX as my typesetting processor. Marcel Herbst Zürich, Switzerland |
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I'd stick with MSWord. As someone already mentioned you can format the Word document very nicely and include photos etc and convert it to pdf with a pdf printer as a last step. I also used this resulting pdf format for Print on demand of hard copies which were published via Createspace (later bought by Amazon) and Ingram Sparks.
As to converting to epub digital format it is a bit more involved if you do it yourself using software such as Calibre but you can use a publisher such as Smashwords to convert from MSWord to epub and many other ebook formats more easily. It beats learning an entirely new system from scratch and all of the above are free tools. My two cents, Theo Rafael |
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Harvey Kaplan
It really depends how sophisticated you need it to be, and as I say, no sooner do you finish it than more material or information will come along and it will need revised. I would keep it simple and use a standard Word programme - and then save as pdf, if you want. Harvey Kaplan On Wed, 21 Jul 2021 at 23:33, Theo Rafael <nloftis@...> wrote: I'd stick with MSWord. As someone already mentioned you can format the Word document very nicely and include photos etc and convert it to pdf with a pdf printer as a last step. I also used this resulting pdf format for Print on demand of hard copies which were published via Createspace (later bought by Amazon) and Ingram Sparks. |
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