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The publishing world is currently in turmoil largely thanks to the freedoms and opportunities that ebooks bring. Simultaneously freeing consumers from the physical realities of print and paper, and freeing authors from the gatekeeper mentality that has held back much good content (as well as less literary output, to be sure), the ebook phenomenon has just hit the mainstream now that ebook reader gadgets have become practical and affordable. Kindles, Kobos and a huge variety of tablets have become popular Christmas presents and each year will see more choice on offer.
To join the revolution, authors and publishers need to provide ebooks in essentially two popular formats – Epub and Mobipocket (Kindle). (Other formats, such as PDF, are sometimes used for creating ebooks but PDFs play less well on reader hardware and cannot be reformatted to adapt to reader constraints. While Jutoh can help with creating PDFs, we will concentrate on the two standard ebooks formats.) To some extent, creating an Epub or a Kindle file is a black art. You’ll find blogs and forums full of advice on using obscure XML and HTML markup. You’ll read about the hoops people are jumping through to get this or that formatting correct on Apple Books or Kindle or Nook. You may see advice on editing XML to create a table of contents before adding it to an Epub zip file. For the uninitiated trawling through this information, the prospect of creating an ebook can look frankly terrifying.
Fortunately, with Jutoh it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to deal with OPF files or HTML, unless your requirements are very complex; you can simply use a friendly editor tool that optimizes its output to take into account the whims of a variety of ebook reader software and hardware. Instead of hiring someone to convert your book, you can save money by using Jutoh to do it yourself – empowering you the author, in the spirit of the ebook revolution. (If you’re a publisher or consultant helping an author create ebooks, then you’ll appreciate the time-saving qualities of Jutoh just as much.) This book is here to help you learn and get the most out of Jutoh, bringing together wisdom that you might otherwise have to glean from around the web. Sometimes even Jutoh can’t entirely smooth over differences between formats, publisher requirements, and ebook reader behaviour, and these areas are documented as much as possible to save you frustration.
If you are a Jutoh user, this guide will be an adjunct to the software (version 2.10 and above) and the built-in user manual, which contains more detail, for example on each dialog presented by Jutoh. You can also type keywords into the Search Help control in the Jutoh toolbar. If you are thinking about using Jutoh, or are using a different method to create your ebooks, I hope you’ll still find some useful tips in these pages. Happy authoring!
Julian Smart, January 2018
Dr Julian Smart is technical director of Edinburgh-based Anthemion Software. He is the founder of the wxWidgets project, a popular construction kit for applications that run on a variety of computer platforms. Julian is the creator of Jutoh, and, with his novelist wife Harriet Smart, the Writer’s Café toolkit for writers, as well as the DialogBlocks and HelpBlocks tools for programmers.
In Chapter 1: Introduction to Ebooks and Jutoh, we start off with a gentle amble around the concept of the ebook and how Jutoh relates to it. You’ll get an overview of the steps involved in overall ebook creation, with reference to those steps that Jutoh helps with.
In Chapter 2: Getting Started, we run through a simple example of creating a project and compiling an ebook. We’ll keep it very brief so you can see that Jutoh makes the simple things simple to achieve.
In Chapter 3: The Jutoh User Interface, we’ll take a look at the main elements of the Jutoh window, so you’ll know your way around. We also look at how you can customise the interface, for example defining new keyboard shortcuts and a ‘favourites’ menu.
In Chapter 4: Working With Projects, we describe what a project consists of, how to add documents to a project, and other aspects of controlling your Jutoh project.
In Chapter 5: Importing Files, we describe in detail the types of file that can be imported and how to tell Jutoh to split it into sections.
In Chapter 6: Editing and Formatting Content, you will learn all about the Jutoh editor and how to use it to edit and format text and pictures.
In Chapter 7: Editing Your Book’s Metadata, we look at ‘metadata’, the information that describes your book to the ebook reader.
In Chapter 8: Creating Your Cover Design, we put Jutoh’s built-in cover designer under the microscope. If you will only be using previously prepared artwork for your book(s), you can skip this chapter.
In Chapter 9: Understanding Configurations, the important concept of ‘configuration’ is explained and each configuration property is explained in detail.
In Chapter 10: Working With Pictures, we describe various aspects of importing pictures and specifying how they will appear in the generated book.
In Chapter 11: Working With Indexes, we explain how Jutoh can help you build a table of contents, and also an alphabetical index, footnotes or endnotes, and a bibliography.
In Chapter 12: Working With Style Sheets, you’ll learn all about styles and style sheets, which are important in formatting your document consistently.
In Chapter 13: Working With String Tables, we describe a trick for customising your books by using keywords in your content that are substituted by values that can depend on the current configuration.
In Chapter 14: Working With Tables, we describe how to create and manipulate tables.
In Chapter 15: Working With Boxes, we describe how to use text boxes to highlight or group content.
In Chapter 16: Working With Tag Objects, we describe how you can use extra markup to enhance your book. If your needs are simple, you can skip this chapter.
In Chapter 17: Adding Narration To Your Book, we see how audio files can be synchronised with your content to create narrated books.
In Chapter 18: Creating Fixed Layout Books, we describe the details of creating fixed layout books, particularly useful for children’s picture books or books containing a lot of pictures.
In Chapter 19: Adding Interactivity To Your Book, we look at the use of form objects for adding interaction in conjunction with JavaScript code.
In Chapter 20: Making Your Books Accessible, we see how you can make your book more accessible to disabled readers when creating Epub 3 files.
In Chapter 21: Working with Text-To-Speech, we describe how you can mark up content to produce more accurate audio files using the text-to-speech facilities in Jutoh.
In Chapter 22: Formatting for Print, we explain how you can create print-ready OpenDocument files using Jutoh.
In Chapter 23: Conditional Formatting, we explain how you can use Jutoh’s facilities for creating different ebook output depending on format, distributor or other criteria, without needing to maintain different versions of your project.
In Chapter 24: Advanced Topics, we look at a variety of advanced topics, such as character encodings, embedding font and media, guide types, and more.
In Chapter 25: Troubleshooting Your Book, we explain the ways in which you can check and improve your book after compiling it. If you find problems with your book, this chapter is your first port of call.
In Chapter 26: Understanding Ebook Formats and Platform, we describe some of the nuances of ebook formats and distribution platforms that you should be aware of.
In Chapter 27: Marketing Your Book, we take a look at various ways in which you can get your book to a wider audience.
The Glossary may be useful for getting used to various terms used within this guide and the software itself.
In Appendix A: Installing Jutoh, we look at how to install Jutoh on various operating systems.
In Appendix B: Configuring Jutoh, we describe how to configure various aspects of Jutoh, in particular useful third-party applications such as Kindlegen and EpubCheck.
In Appendix C: The Jutoh Box Model, we describe how content, padding, margins and border all relate to one another.
In Appendix D: The Bibliographic Formatting Language, we describe the XML-based language for customising how a bibliography is formatted.
In Appendix E: Speech Markup Reference, we list the available speech properties and their usage.
In Appendix F: Speech Profile Reference, we list the options available in a speech profile for altering the way text-to-speech works for particular configurations.
In Appendix G: Alphabet Description Reference, we describe the XML-based language for describing lexicon alphabets for use in the lexicon editor.
The convention Menu | Command, such as View | Preferences, indicates a menu and the command on that menu.
The notation Ctrl+S refers to holding down the control key while pressing the ‘S’ key. On Mac, you can interpret this as Command+S.
Where we refer to right-clicking, if you’re on a Mac, this action will be performed by control-clicking since there’s only one mouse button.
The terms compiling, building and generating an ebook all refer to the same act of creating an ebook from the information in your project.
A context menu is the menu you get when right-clicking (or control-clicking on a Mac), or pressing the context menu button on a Windows keyboard.
Document is a general term for each separate item that can appear in a Jutoh project outline, whether it’s a chapter of your book, an embedded font, an audio file, or any other supported document type.
Book section refers to a specific kind of document in which you can edit text and graphics; it can contain a chapter, a title page, a table of contents or any individual part of a book. This may sometimes be abbreviated to section.
A dialog is a window that opens in response to some command or condition; usually (but not always) it needs to be dismissed before you can continue working in the main window. Dialogs usually have a Help button that will give more detailed information than this guide can cover.
Screenshots are taken on Windows, but the functionality is identical on Linux and Mac even if it looks slightly different.
Contents | Start | End | Previous: From the Horse’s Mouth | Next: Chapter 1: Introduction to Ebooks and Jutoh