By: Nancy Fessenden McEntee
Link: View book details at Amazon
Formatting of Word manuscript for CreateSpace on-demand publishing, conversion to ePub and Kindle, and cover design, 2017. This book is a non-fiction history with many old photographs and illustrations of people and places, photos of objects and worn documents, extensive endnotes, a long bibliography, plus an index of names and subjects.
Unlike most of the books I’ve formatted, this one started with a print version instead of an eBook. Every aspect of the layout is precisely controlled in the print version, particularly image size and placement, captions, quotations, fonts, indents, and line height. The image files are large and grayscale, though in a book like this, few started out as color photos.
As expected, the text formatting fell into place fairly quickly, but preparing images for print and then ePub/Kindle, along with preserving the index in the transition took much more time and effort. Restoring old photos can be fun and rewarding; recreating an Index is a tedious loathsome task with arguably limited value in eBooks.
Fortunately, the author was careful about creating index markers judiciously instead of marking way too many instances of the same name or word in close proximity. Word takes care of the latter situation automatically by suppressing multiple instances of index markers on the same page when generating the index. Because the index of this book was so carefully constructed, I decided to find a way to get the original index markers into the ePub and convert them to the Sigil editor’s format. As it turned out, the task is unavoidably slow, but not impossible. I hope to cover the procedure in a future post.