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Showing posts from January, 2018

Kindle Once Again - this time for Walk, Hike, Saunter

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 Last time I did this was Dec 2017. At the moment, memory of how to do it is pretty foggy, but luckily I have my earlier blog posts on this to refresh my memory so printing them out to review. (look for Kindle label in this blog to find).  This book is a little easier than the others - text and inline photos, a table of contents, but no index. Susan has promised it will be out in two and a half weeks, so will try to do that. My immediate issue is that I remember that I have to make some changes to the Indesign file before putting out the epub file that I will update for Kindle, but don't remember quite what they were. Pausing to read my prior posts, and to review Kindle code for Healing Miles . From my 2012 notes I saw that to get reliable chapter breaks, each chapter had to be a separate xhtml file. The default of Indesign is to put out one big xhtml file, but it will break on a style, so I need to be sure the current Indesign document (for Walk, Hike, Saunter ) has an appropriat

Anatomy of what goes into our digital presentations - example Caminos Norte & Primitivo for REI

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People sometimes ask me what software we use, why not Powerpoint, etc. so I'm going to log my thoughts and progress in building our presentation for REI. First of all, the software. Back in the late 90s when I was dealing with Powerpoint in a business setting, it was really kludgy, a typical Microsoft product of the time. So, I am biased against Powerpoint, probably unwarranted for the current product. I Googled images on bad Powerpoint presentations - actually a lot of very good info on presentations there, but no ugly image I could insert here. When we started doing presentations around 2003, I needed some digital software that would do dissolves, play music, integrate video clips, etc. and found WnSoft's PicturesToExe , very inexpensive. It didn't do everything I wanted but the projected image was far better than anything I had seen. I've stuck with that product ever since. Judging from its forum participants, it seems to be mostly used by high end photography c

Kindle Revisted again - this time for Healing Miles

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Dec 2017 and I am putting Susan's new book, Healing Miles , out to Kindle. I assume things will have changed again in the Kindle world since the last book (in 2012), so I'm logging my steps for my benefit and maybe yours. First step was to copy the Indesign file that represented the final version sent to Createspace and Lightning Source (print on design companies). Indesign puts out a PDF file that would to to a conventional printer, or a POD company such as CS or LS. Indesign also can put out an epub file that is the raw material for the Kindle version of a book. I work with a new copy of the ID file, as some tweaks are made for Kindle. One is that some Kindles, and certainly most Kindle Readers read color, so all the black and white images and illustrations in the book have to be replaced by color versions. I'm setting the book up as text reflowable. This was the only method on the 1st kindles. Now you can do fixed format, comics, etc. But for a mostly text based book