FM --> MIF2Go --> Kindle?

[Jeremy H. Griffith]

I sent this to Hedley off list, and he urged me to repost it
on Framers.  So here it is.

--Jeremy

On Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:34:32 +1100, Hedley Finger <hedley.finger at gmail.com> 
wrote:

>Do you or will you have in the future a mif2go *.mobi, *.prc, or *.azw
>generator?  I have attached a copy of the Amazon Kindle Publishing
>Guidelines for your perusal.

I found a fairly simple method, at least to MOBI for Kindle, 
but the same toolset does many more formats.

First, get Calibre.  It's free:
  http://calibre-ebook.com/download_windows
Run it and set up its own empty directory somewhere.

Now set up your Frame book as usual  If you have stuff
before the TOC, like cover, title page, etc., put that in
one Frame file and include it as the first item in the
TOC (possibly conditioned out for PDF or other formats).
Make sure you add the char format for page numbers in 
the TOC so you can tell M2G to delete them (par. 12.7.2.3).

Set up a Mif2Go project for plain HTML, with wrap and
ship on, so you get a zip of the HTML.  Run it.

Make sure you don't get the log file in the wrap
dir; if you did, remove it from the .zip.  It will
mess you up.

In the Wrap dir, rename the *TOC.htm to index.htm.
Remove the *TOC.htm from the zip, and put in index.htm.
(In Win 7, you can do that with Explorer.)

In Calibre, Add Book and select the zip you made.
Calibre copies it into its own dir.  Fill in the
metadata Calibre wants (title, author, lang, etc.).

With the zip selected in Calibre, Convert to MOBI.
Look at all the screens before telling it to start;
under Look and Feel, disable scaling of fonts, and
under Structure, specify NO TOC.  You may see other
tweaks you want to make.

Look at the resulting MOBI in a viewer, preferably
a real Kindle or the Amazon Kindle app on your desktop.
Calibre has its own viewer, but it doesn't behave the 
same as Kindle.  I wasted some time fixing things that
were fine on the actual Kindle.  For example, Kindle
puts a page break for each new HTML file, so you can
control those by where you Split.  The Calibre viewer
ran them all together.

You will probably want to make changes in font size,
alignment, indents, etc.  Open the local.css in the
wrap dir in an editor like Notepad++ and adjust it.
Save, and drag the CSS to the .zip in the Calibre 
directory.  Rerun the Convert.  I did this about 20
times.  ;-)

There you are...  Took me about five hours for the
first 200-page book, and an hour for the second one.

Note:  Most of that time was spent tweaking CSS.
The different e-readers are totally inconsistent in
their support, even of the simplest things like
left-margin.

-- Jeremy H. Griffith, at Omni Systems Inc.
  <jeremy at omsys.com>  http://www.omsys.com/