Further info... The same file, viewed in Calibre on the Mac, displays MUCH better than in ADR. The Tip/Note/Caution tables still look silly, but the bullets and numbers are aligned and display correctly. The print and copy functions work fine in Calibre. (Note: I have not recreated the file; I am simply viewing it using Calibre's viewer.)
As the publisher of these books, I can download the ePub without using ADR. Therefore, I can upload it to our wiki and/or to Alfresco, so people can get it for free and without going through Lulu.com and ADR. I'll do that later today. I haven't tested this file yet in any other ePub readers, so if others have a chance to do so (once I get the file uploaded where you can get it), that would be useful. We can then write up a little "how to" to help people view the file, copy it to their mobile devices, etc. I can see a blog post coming on! What excites me most about this is having Lulu.com do the conversion work. ;-) --Jean On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 21:05, Jean Weber <[email protected]> wrote: > FYI... > > Lulu.com has converted our "Getting Started with LibreOffice 3" book > to ePub format. I finally got around to downloading the ePub to see > what it looked like. (For newcomers to this list: printed copies of > the LibO user guides are made available through Lulu.com.) > > The good news is that the ePub is not nearly as bad as I expected from > my own trial conversions of OOo books over a year ago; the text is > readable and the figures are in place and sized reasonably. > > There is a lot of bad news, however. First, the layout has suffered. > For example, the Tip/Note/Caution tables look both wrong and silly (a > box with the Tip/Note/Caution words as a sort of heading, then a big > gap, and then the text). Another example: The bullets and numbers on > lists are offset into what would be the left-hand margin, but there > really isn't a margin on the left, so they fall off the edge of the > "page". At some magnifications, two "columns" or "pages" appear > side-by-side, so numbers and bullets on lists in the right-hand column > are visible. There are other conspicuous problems as well. Most or all > can probably be solved by making some changes in our styles and > template, if we decide that's worth doing at some point in the future > -- and when someone works out what needs to be done. > > Another problem is that Lulu is using a form of DRM that requires use > of Adobe Digital Reader to download the ePub from Lulu's website, and > they didn't tell me that until after I had purchased the book. I > object to this in principle, especially given the CC-BY license on the > books, and the fact that ADR apparently doesn't run on Linux. I may > pull the ePub from Lulu because of that, and try producing our own > (DRM-free) ePubs for distribution through our own website. > > The Adobe website says that one can move (copy?) ePubs from ADR to > various ebook readers, including iPads, but I haven't attempted to do > that yet. > > --Jean > -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/documentation/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
