{"id":2483,"date":"2008-11-23T03:20:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-23T08:20:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2020-03-27T21:24:42","modified_gmt":"2020-03-28T02:24:42","slug":"things-that-work-bbedit-9","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/2008\/11\/23\/things-that-work-bbedit-9\/","title":{"rendered":"Things that Work: BBedit 9"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5271708072451490818\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This past week, I’ve been making my published novels available as ebooks. My experience with Emperor Dad<\/a> and then Roswell or Bust<\/a> being out as iPhone App ebooks was encouraging. I don’t make much on each sale, but it does put the stories out there where more people can find them. When I was asked if they were available in other formats, I began the process of converting them to Kindle and Mobi formats. <\/p>\n

Both processes are very similar. You feed in your novel in one of several formats and it is converted into a dumbed down HTML version. Then comes the process of editing the HTML so that it displays correctly.<\/p>\n

I have to wonder if Kindle was a reengineered mobi format. But in any case, the readers only handle a subset of HTML, not like the WebKit based version in the iPhone. Graham Perks did the conversions for the iPhone Apps, and for that I’m grateful. It wasn’t a simple conversion.<\/p>\n

When I ran into the problem that the Mobi Creator software wouldn’t convert my Mac Word document, I experimented and discovered that PDF to HTML conversion of both Mobi Creator and the Kindle web tools was a adequate first pass. But only a first pass. I had to convert that code created by dumb automation and fix it. For that I needed a good HTML editor.<\/p>\n

For years, I’ve been using BBEdit<\/a>. Maybe back to the original version, I don’t know. My memory isn’t that good. However, I stopped upgrading back at BBEdit 8 because I was using iWeb for my main website and was no longer hand coding the HTML. But now I needed to do that again. The upgrade was cheap, and I discovered that version 9 is a nice improvement of an already classic tool.<\/p>\n

BBEdit has more options than I’d ever use, but let me tell you what I did. <\/p>\n

I went to the Kindle page and fed the PDF of my trade paperback novel in. After a moment’s crunching, I could preview the resulting code in their on-line Kindle emulator. It was pretty ugly. I downloaded the HTML that had been created and unzipped it. On some of the novels, the auto-conversion had even created a table of contents, but on others it hadn’t. I did some minor content editing, like changing the ISBN number for the new ebook version, but it was mostly formatting.<\/p>\n

\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5271705149558217570\"<\/a>\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5271705155115051250\"<\/a>My paper version (and the iPhone App version) had nice dropcaps at each scene change, but Kindle doesn’t do that, so I had to do a simpler version with just the font size command. Interestingly, the automatic conversion changed some of them into a h3<\/span> block, some into a h2<\/span> block and still others into a lettrine<\/span> tag, which I’d never heard of, not that they actually worked in the ebook version.<\/p>\n

The conversion also was rather erratic in its placements of paragraph blocks, sometimes using p<\/span>‘s and other times using br<\/span>‘s. I had to fix that. Thousands of changes through the novel. Conversion of styles sometimes came up with strange colors, I don’t know why. In all, there were hours of manual changes. The bulk was done with BBEdit’s nice grep-capable find and replace, but even then, it had to be eyeballed. A keystroke gave me a side by side rendered version where I could spot layout problems. Once that was done, I was able to use the built-in Tidy functions to convert everything to XHTML and scan for errors. There were thousands of them, and I had to knock them out manually. This is not a job for a script. Mangle formatting of a dialog and the reader will never understand the book.<\/p>\n

\"\"id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5271713096911989730\"<\/a>Once I finished the Kindle formats<\/a> and published the books that way, I fired up my tame Windows version and fed the Kindle HTML into MobiPocket Creator, and relatively easily created the mobi versions and put them up on the MobiPocket store<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, now I’m done. I fed dumbed-down, clean HTML into the ebook publishing programs and I now have my books out there for people who prefer to read on their Palms, cell-phones, etc. Now to see if there are any sales.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This past week, I’ve been making my published novels available as ebooks. My experience with Emperor Dad and then Roswell or Bust being out as iPhone App ebooks was encouraging. I don’t make much on each sale, but it does put the stories out there where more people can find them. When I was asked… Continue reading Things that Work: BBedit 9<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2484,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[1],"tags":[112,51,115,299],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/11\/Picture3.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4t90x-E3","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2483"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2488,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions\/2488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/henrymelton.net\/2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}