Well I got a new play phone to do android development with, but thats a long term activity and the smartphone will probably remain in it’s box for a long while yet; as for day-to-day use I still use my faithfull 2G calls only phone.
Having a smart phone I may actually unpack one day did remind me that I have been meaning to start changing all my documentation/manuals from PDF format to EPUB format at some point.
The bad news is fully EPUB3 authouring software (video extensions etc) is still in the horrible expensive commerciasl software only arena.
The good news is simple EPUB documents can be created using the worlds favourite free word publishing application, which of course is LibreOffice. That is done using extentions.
Some quick google searches showed me
- Documents saved in native odt format can be converted to epub and mobi using calibre, lucky me I already have Calibre installed
- LibreOffice has multiple extensions that can export to epub. Two candidates at the top of searches were
- elaix, on the LibreOffice extension site
- Writer2ePubi, which is an Apache OpenOffice extention on the OpenOffice extension site that is usable with LibreOfiice. Interestingly it does indicate Calibre will give a better conversion, which I assume is a gap they intend to try to close so watch this one
I will probably start with Writer2ePub as someone has taken the time to create a post on using Writer2ePub with LibreOffice so I know this extension is being used in the wild.
The best news for me is that all the static PDF documentation I will be wanting to convert to EPUB is… it has all been produced using LibreOfiice (ok the older ones with openoffice) so all the source odt/odf files are available to allow me to update the PDfs anyway.
The only difference in the way I do things will be that when I need to make updates to the manuals source document due to changes I have made in the programs they document, as well as the standard ‘export as pdf’ for the current website manuals I’ll also do an export as EPUB using one of the extensions.
In the short term whether I end up using either of the two extentions, or just use Calibre to convert the source odt bypassing the extensions alltogether, will just depend upon which produces the cleanest EPUB format needing the least manual cleanup.
So for simple EPUB books you can use LibreOffice. However as the EPUB3 standard allows for little things like embedded video and audio it is fairly obvious you will never be able to create complex EBooks using a word processor.
I will probably do it the hard way and script the building of ebooks. As while noted above all my static manuals are produced by LibreOffice now, but this website also produces a lot of dynamically created PDF files using bash scripts because I took the time to read the specs and work out how to do so on the fly without authouring software.
I will have to spend a bit of time reading the EPUB3 specs but as I eventually had a need to generate dynamic PDF files based on lots of different external sources I’m sure I will find the same need for EPUB files.
Plus using the extensions will probably still require cleanup using Calibre and I don’t want to have to use multiple tools to get a result.
But for the purposes of this post, if you have been using LibreOffice to create PDF documentation then using it to create EPUB format documentation is basically an extra button click if you use the totally unreviewed by me extensions.
If you want the bells and whistles like embedding video into yout ebooks it looks like it is still a totally expensive commercial software solution only at the moment.
