[FM Discuss] Recommendations for switching to a good documentation system for US Peace Corps Philippines

[James Simmons]

Micah,


If your documents are Word docs you should be able to save them as HTML,
then run kindlegen on them.  I have done this for several books that are
only available as web pages and the results are quite readable.  If you
want a little more control over formatting you might get the free program
Sigil and use that to convert the HTML to an EPUB, then run kindlegen on
that.  If there are images in your docs you might need to resize them with
The GIMP.  600 pixels wide should be workable on a Kindle.

I am writing a novel and the method I use to convert from Libre Office to
Kindle is pretty much what I described.  HTML, then EPUB using Sigil, then
Kindlegen.  Since I plan to sell the Kindle version and care about
formatting I wrote a Python script to strip out extra junk in the HTML
before feeding ity to Sigil.  I can give you that script if you like.

James Simmons


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 4:00 AM, Micah Roth <micah.roth at ucla.edu> wrote:

> Dear flossmanuals,
>
> My name is Micah Roth. I am a US Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) currently
> serving in the Philippines. Peace Corps Philippines has recently decided to
> initiate the move to ereaders instead of hard-copy training materials for
> our training events.They saw that the ereader model they bought (the 6"
> Kindle 3 standard, I believe) has support for PDF and figured they could
> just save their doc/docx files as PDF and be done with it. When that failed
> miserably, somebody asked me what they could do about it and I've been
> researching the process for a few months in my extra time.
>
> I have discovered many references on the Internet to markup-style
> documentation methods that incorporate DITA and Docbook, but haven't really
> found a good way to teach people to use those systems. I found Wikipedia's
> export to epub function and what plugins would be required to make a local
> installation of mediawiki do that, but I'm not sure this is the best
> method. And of course, I found the awesome booksprint concept and I have
> read a bit about Booki, Pressbooks, and Booktype - but don't know what tool
> to choose. I would really appreciate any feedback on this stuff I can get.
>
> This is coming to a head because I was told today that we will have two
> official booksprints: one for Education, and another for
> Children-Youth-Families and Environment. These booksprints will be to
> create the Technical Binder used for the next batch of Volunteers' main
> trainig events. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to actually *do* a
> booksprint - at this point, it's just a word. So, is there like a manual
> out there for how to set up and execute a booksprint? If they don't have
> guidance all that's going to end up happening is everybody plopping
> .doc/.docx files in a folder and then one unlucky soul copy-pasting them
> all into one giant doc, and then printing it. Oy, disastre.
>
> I will be available to attend one of the booksprints (the second one I
> mentioned) and I have been asked to facilitate it - so any instructions,
> advice, tips, etc would be highly welcome, since this is my first rodeo.
>
> Thanks a ton!
>
> ~Micah
>
> _______________________________________________
> Discuss mailing list
> Discuss at lists.flossmanuals.net
> http://lists.flossmanuals.net/listinfo.cgi/discuss-flossmanuals.net
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.flossmanuals.net/pipermail/discuss-flossmanuals.net/attachments/20130424/65341b94/attachment.htm>