Thursday, January 15, 2009

eCub Adventures Update #1

It occurred to me that I should make a MobiPocket version of The People of the Abyss so I can look at it on my LifeDrive to see what it's like.

Unfortunately, eCub failed when I told it to create a MobiPocket version. Of course, it was all due to human error, as the developer informed me:
If it just failed with no helpful message, probably the command line is not set up properly in Preferences/Helpers - you need to get mobigen.exe and tell eCub where it is.

Yes, that was the case. I didn't have the needed file.

However, earlier yesterday I'd downloaded the necessary MobiPocket software.

And, eejit that I am (because veterans of that software will already know what's coming next), I discovered that the MobiPocket desktop software could import ePub.

So I gave it the ePub file I'd created with eCub.

And BOOM!

Here are some screensnaps of it on the desktop:



That cover is only temporary. I need to find or create a better one.



I dropped the font size on the desktop down to 12 to make it appear more book-like.



What's interesting is that Mobi scales the photos depending on my LifeDrive's screen orientation. In landscape, that photo gets bigger!

A pleasant surprise was the text was right-justified (something I've not so far been able to get the ePub version to do!) and has hyphenation. The hyphenation is sometimes spectacularly bad, however (I saw "pol-iceman," for example), and there are still too many gaps between words to make it look book-like.

I also tried using the MobiType option. The type becomes nearly microsocopic unless I specify the largest one. And then, italics are lost in the process!

Abyss is still in pre-alpha form. I have to get the photos for it, format the text that opens each chapter, and tweak the tables. Tables aren't handled well in Mobi, by the way, nor are blockquote and pre-formatted text.

But the Mobi version is just for me to look at.

It's the ePub version that will matter.

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