FM --> MIF2Go --> Kindle? - SUCCESS

Fri Feb 24 08:33:20 PST 2012

Here’s a happy tale, and a more detailed procedure:
It took a few hours of experimentation, but I now have converted one of my books into .mobi for Kindle use and into ePub for iPad use.
Because of this, my company wants me to publish all of our product doc into ePub for iPad users, and my original Introducing OneSign book into Kindle for marketing use. This week my company attended a big trade show in Las Vegas where they used Kindle Fires as a give-away to draw traffic to their booth. Now we can send a follow-up email to the winners with the Kindle-ized book to put on their prize – the timing of this thread could not have been better.
And they are buying me a Kindle Fire for testing purposes ☺

Here’s how I did it, built upon Jeremy’s procedure:
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.

I had Calibre installed, but I updated it to be sure. I do like Calibre.

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).

I copied all the book files and images folder into a new ePub folder. This is because I did not want to fiddle around too much with my source files.
I copied my front matter (3pp of title page, what’s in this book, and who should read this book; I deleted the contact info and legal info text insets) into the ToC.
I also deleted the Index from the book.

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).

I tried this at first, then changed my mind. It was not working as smoothly as I hoped. For example, the book is full of X-refs that include page numbers, and I could not think of how to get rid of them using the Mif2Go approach. Because I had copied my source files into a new directory for this publishing output, I simply changed the X_Ref definition to eliminate the page references and used Clean Import to import the cross-reference definitions across all files.

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

I never did get a ZIP file, so I ended up making my own. It worked fine.

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.

I got a log every time and deleted it every time, no problem.

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.)

I never got the ZIP, so changing it in the Wrap folder and then zipping it up did the trick.

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.).

Don’t forget to add a cover if you have one – use the Browse option.

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.

I did it this way and it came out a thing of beauty. I forgot to turn off the ToC setting and it got me later so I had to rerun it, but that was my own pilot error.

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.

It looked a lot better on my Kindle 3 than it did in the Calibre Kindle viewer. For example, in the Calibre viewer, many paragraphs had way too much space following them. That vanished on my Kindle. Since we gave away Kindle Fires at the trade show, I will test it Monday on my (very own shiny new) Kindle Fire to see how it looks on that device.

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.  ;-)

I did none of that. The .mobi was good to go straightaway.

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.

It took me about two hours with the benefit of Jeremy’s instructions. Most of that time was exploring Calibre and rerunning the conversion after I had forgotten to turn off the ToC, adding the cover, etc.

***
Then I ran the conversion again, to an ePUB format for iPad users. It worked fine – I spent more time tracking down an iPad that I could use and then figuring out how to get the doc onto the iPad than I spent generating the doc. It looks great, but I need more iPad time to test it.

***
That brings up an important point. It is nice to generate the file, but you have to get it to your users. Kindle users comfortable with copying it to their device through the USB cable can do it easily enough, but I will have to write up a procedure for our lucky winners from the trade show, many of whom may have never had a Kindle or never copied a file that way.
I looked into putting the doc on the Amazon Kindle store, but that is much more of a hassle than you might expect, and I am still waiting to see if there is a way to post it for free. If you use the Kindle Direct program, you must charge a minimum of $1.99 or $2.99 depending on which of two confusing options you choose. I have an email in to Amazon support for help with that.

As for distributing the ePUB to iPad users, well that’s even more of a hassle. You have to get it to iTunes, or to your own iCloud account. In the end I got it to work, but I am not at all sure what I did! OTOH for my users, the iPad docs are going to customers, who are network administrators so they can probably figure out for themselves how to get a file onto their iPads, so my plan is simply to make the file available.

I would love to learn more from anyone with experience distributing .mobi and ePUB docs, but that’s probably best left to another thread.
john

ps – this happened between the time that I sent a quote to our Marketing chief and his reply. He was busy at the trade show, so I still have no reply. The quote was from an outside agency to Kindle-ize the doc for $2/page. I still would like to go through them so I can have more time for proper QA since this is all new to me, but if you are considering Kindle-izing your documentation, it’s worth knowing that DCLabs will do it for $2/page, plus-or-minus depending on doc complexity.

From: framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com [mailto:framers-bounces at lists.frameusers.com] On Behalf Of MamaRed Knight
Sent: Tuesday, February 21, 2012 4:44 PM
To: Jeremy H. Griffith
Cc: framers at lists.frameusers.com
Subject: Re: FM --> MIF2Go --> Kindle?

Great one Jeremy! Thanks sooooooo much for the repost. One hint, if I might. I recently published a Kindle book after many hours of research. Setting the fonts doesn't do much because the Kindle user can set what they want it to be. I streamlined and focused on 2-3 headings that were proportionally larger than the body text.

Don't know if that is useful and hope it saves someone the time I spent putzing with the stuff!

Big hugs
MamaRed
On Tue, Feb 21, 2012 at 4:28 PM, Jeremy H. Griffith <jeremy at omsys.com<mailto:jeremy at omsys.com>> wrote:

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<mailto: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<mailto:jeremy at omsys.com>>  http://www.omsys.com/
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