[FM Discuss] viva la booki revolution

[James Simmons]

Adam,

Best wishes for Booktype.  We sure need something like that--something
we can use to make e-books and print-on-demand books with
collaboration.  My current Booki install is good up to a point, and I
did use it for an e-book and a CreateSpace book.  The problem was that
Booki's epub lacked a table of contents page, so I had to use Sigil
and the Seamonkey web page editor plus a Zip utility to fix that.  My
Create Space PDF needed to have photographs 300 DPI or better, so I
ended up copying and pasting my chapters into the 6x9" template Create
Space provides for Word.  I used Open Office instead, and the result
was that I lost all my italics and bolds on paste.  (I did a Paste
Special using the HTML option which *should* have preserved them but
didn't).  So I had to fix this by hand and I know I missed a lot.
Then I ran spell check in Open Office and found a LOT of dumb errors
that many, many readings had missed.  So I had to fix my e-book in
Sigil by hand and re-upload that.

I'm getting a second proof copy from CreateSpace on Thursday and
already I know I need to fix a bunch more italics and bolds I missed
the first time.  That's an Open Office bug, not a Booki bug (MS Word
does the paste correctly) but if Booki had been a little better I
would not have had to deal with OO.

On top of that Booki was pretty difficult to install.  Plus way too
frequently you get an empty editing window when you go to edit a
chapter, not just in Firefox but in Chrome too, although not as often.

I still believe in the potential of this software though.  One day it
will do everything a book publishing system needs to do, and it will
Just Work.

James Simmons


On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 8:10 AM, adam <adam at flossmanuals.net> wrote:
> hi,
>
> as you know FM has been involved in building a Open Source collaborative
> book production platform for the last 2 years. We recently formed an
> alliance with Sourcefabric (Berlin based Open Source company) to develop it
> further.
>
> So today is the day Booki has been renamed and had a lot of work on it. Its
> now called Booktype and the demo is now here:
> http://booktype-demo.sourcefabric.org/
>
> The site is here:
> http://www.booktype.org
>
> Its pretty much the same thing but stronger, faster, better, more
>
> We will upgrade fm and booki.cc with the new sources soon. In the meantime
> there is a new manual on FM for Booktype although it needs some love. if
> anyone would like to jump in please do! The manual needs to be improved a
> lot and all help welcome
>
> http://booki.flossmanuals.net/booktype/_edit/
>
>
>
> adam
> --
>
> --
> Adam Hyde
> Founder, FLOSS Manuals
> Project Manager, Booki
> Book Sprint Facilitator
> mobile :+ 49 177 4935122
> identi.ca : @eset
> booki.flossmanuals.net : @adam
>
> http://www.flossmanuals.net
> http://www.booki.cc
> http://www.booksprints.net
>
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