Frame to eBook

[James Monaco]

All our books begin in Framemaker (7, Mac). After some trial and error, here is the workflow I found most effective for converting the books to ePub (and Mobi). Our books are heavily illustrated, so this is a large part of the work.

1. Produce the pdf in color.

2. Save pdf as Word.

3. Import to the Pages eBook template that Apple provides. Or better, cut and paste from Word. Import is flakey. Don't do anything in Word!

4. Clean up Front Matter.

5. Delete headers and footers, if any. (Most will be eliminated by the import.)  Don't delete TOC. Pages will produce it, but you should include it at front with links.

6. In Pages, the top-level paragraph style selected in the Document inspector’s TOC tab is used to create chapters in your publication.

7. Check for inline images. Move images out of the Word frames. Then move images so they don't break paragraphs. Move footnotes right after their paragraphs.

8. Insert cover at top. (Twice)

9. Format text: Search for assigned paragraph tags and change. You probably don't have to worry about page breaks before because the new P tags will fix those.

10. Adjust images.

Note: you can get larger images by saving Word doc as html. Of course you can also just insert originals, or copy from the pdf.

Yes, you have a lot of work to do in Pages before producing a decent ePub file, but the end result is good. Until FM outputs ePub this is the way to go.

Hop this helps.




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James Monaco     
Harbor Electronic Publishing
84 Mt Misery Dr Sag Harbor NY 11963
631 725 9513

http://HEPDigital.com