Hello LyX users, I am sending this email to let people know that I have produced a converter for LyX that produces an excellent quality EPUB/Kindle file. This converter takes the LyXHTML file exported from LyX, and spits out an EPUB file that fully supports Kindle importing. This splits the single export file from LyX into the multiple chapters, supporting Front Matter, Main Matter, and Back Matter. It builds a List of Figures, Table of Contents, and moves all Footnotes to become Chapter Endnotes, which Kindle will show in a separate window at the bottom of the screen. All backlinks are included also.
I love using LyX with the LyXBook theme (as it has the greatest number of paragraph formats), and I am able to set up a system of files, having different Front Matter versions. Unless you have actually self-published a book, you will not fully appreciate how important it is to have different Front Matter versions for a single book. A single published book can have Hardback, Softcover, PDF, EPUB, and Kindle versions, all of which require different information at the front of the book. LyX allows me to set up a system for this. The only problem was, I could not produce an EPUB or Kindle version from the files, so I had to create my own converter. I use the LyXHTML export because it has tag classes for each type of element in the files, allowing me to make the correct decisions for processing and producing the EPUB or Kindle format. I know that the next version of LyX is supposed to produce EPUB, but I have my doubts that it will be done in a way that produces high-quality Kindle books, since I have now learned just how to do this. I can tell you that NONE of the current tools out there for creating EPUBS does this conversion correctly or completely. The new tool I have created does. Just so people are aware, there is a large and growing market of people self-publishing their own books. I am doing my best to get authors turned on to using LyX as their book-writing tool. If anyone is interested in helping me get the code I've written out there so that other authors can have the ability to automatically produce perfect EPUB and Kindle, please let me know. As one final problem, the LyXHTML export fails to include anything in the LaTeK code blocks, and where this really shows up is with the Lettrine function for Initials at the start of each Chapter. This initial text is just omitted from the export file. The other HTML export includes them, but it does not have any of the LyX class information for each tag, so it is useless for conversion. Is there a way this can be fixed? It would be awesome if this text is not excluded, since it is very much part of the material. I had to come up with a very kludgy workaround for this in my converter, which really should not be there. I am happy to work with whoever is doing the EPUB portion of the next release. My problem was, I could not wait for that to come out. Life must go on, as they say :) All the Best, *Ken Kopelson* (619) 733-3374
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