A day indoors

As forecast, the weather was wet and windy today, so apart from a meet with Stephen and Jayne in the Willow Tree, followed by a bit of shopping at the fortnightly mini market, we've spent it on board.

It has meant that a lot of progress has been made on Sheila's book, which is now in its final proof read phase. I seem to have found the best way of preparing a Kindle book on the Mac, after a certain amount of experimentation. This involved doing the main work in Pages, the Mac equivalent of Word, and then exporting the file as Rich Text Format (rtf), thus stripping off any odds and sods of tags left invisibly in there by whatever cutting and pasting has been done.

I opened the rtf file in TextEdit, and exported it from there as HTML. That file I opened in Sigil, where I did all the formatting, adding a cover image, breaking the book up into chapters and so on. Sigil saves the file as an ePub, the version used by most ereaders other than the Kindle. It is possible to use the KindleGen plug-in, part of the Amazon free app Kindle Previewer, to convert that to a .mobi file, but this doesn't create a proper Kindle Table of Contents (TOC).

Instead, I loaded the ePub file into calibre, and used its conversion system to generate the .mobi file which is the Kindle's native format. It seems a long way round the houses, but Sigil is really easy to use to do the formatting, and calibre seems to produce the best version of the mobi file, including a proper TOC.

Apart from that, we've not done a lot. We're still waiting for the chairs to arrive, so have been having to get up in good time each morning, in case they turn up at eight o'clock.

/floor

At least they are not likely to arrive on a Saturday, so we can have a lie in tomorrow.