Viewers? eBook Creators?

Posted by 22111
Nov 8, 2013 at 03:02 AM

As for ebook creation directly by your outliner, think again.

Your choice is reduced to the extreme if you try to do your work in program x, which then must create an ebook, and which then should also have a pleasant look and satisfying functionality.

MyNotesKeeper is not that appealing, layout-wise; Maple charges 10 bucks plus VAT apiece, and ActionOutline’s separate ebook creator costs 90 bucks (no problem) and does not present any acceptable search functionality (which is a real problem); developers of the heavyweights don’t seem to be interested in joining this feature (there are 2004 (!!!) forum entries in the MyInfo forum where the developer spoke of introducing such a functionality…). Also, a “viewer” instead of an ebook, is obviously NOT acceptable anymore, i.e. it should be an executable, not a viewer, and then a file to be loaded into the viewer - except for pdf’s, but here, the standard viewer (be it from Adobe, be it an alternative) is pre-installed on every system.

Today, there is Pdf Flip at bits, 100$ instead of 300, and the numerous real-life examples on their website are highly instructive - it is obvious that if you want to do sort of a “magazine”, such “flipbooks” are the medium of choice, but for information purposes, this would be totally a) over-the-top AND b) totally impractical for your reader.

On the other hand, it’s obvious that pdf’s ain’t really but the second-best solution - it’ll always be another pdf, not something that is your own corporate image at 100 p.c.

So let’s see what you would like to have: You want a tree, with easy navigation (by keyboard); you want a caption not with “.pdf”, “Adobe” and such, but with your company’s name, and then the “book name”; you want a decent search function, which means, ideally, that the tree is replaced by a search results list, and, ideally again, the reader should be able to toggle easily between the two, which means the search results would not be lost by displaying the tree again. And it should all have a pleasant, professional look, also for pics here and there (no videos in my case, but your mileage might differ).

And yes, ideally, it would display two text columns wherever you want them, but this is the one criteria that would probably eliminate any possible solution from our choice (or is there a program that will display 2-column pdf’s in its viewer?).

Now, there are many “ebook creators” to buy, and I’m pleasantly surprised that many of them offer, at reasonable prices (and, of course, without royalties, as is the case for Maple), totally acceptable “screen experience”, their functionality must be further examined, of course.

This software category is not very well known, to say the least, and we do not speak here of those tools that do ebooks for special “readers”, from amazon, Apple, some doomed bookstore chains, etc.

We can continue to use the outliner of our respective choice, and then there must be a stable export format, and from which then the ebook creator should import your tree - this remains to bee seen, of course; it would be weird to have to export, from a tree format, into some flat format as .rtf or .html, from which then the ebook creator will create a trew anew - perhaps some of them will have some standard outliner formats as import formats?

Anyway, your reader is not interested in your productive environment - he wants content of interest to him, in a professional “package” which allows for smooth reading (and this means, smooth navigation, and smooth searching, too), so the “visuals” of the ebook creator in question seem to be of extreme importance here.

Of course, there will always be the alternative to present such content within your web site, but if you want to have some control over this content, there would be coded access only, and which is more, with each customer/prospect needing his own access code, which is the only sensible way to monitor if some of them gave their codes to third parties.

It goes without saying that as soon as it is a web format, you can display two columns, either with html tables, traditionally, or, now, with css, of course. And this brings me back to ebook creators: If they allow for html/css content, or if html is their native file format, instead of .rtf, they could become an ideal presentation format for office use. So the traditional problem is the ubiquity of the .rtf format for text formatting, and which doesn’t easily permit 2-column layouts, whilst it’s perfectly probable that more and more developers will abandon that old MS format. Btw, my formatted-text export is rock-stable with html, but not so with .rtf, and thus I often use the html export for “plain-text” export, but while preserving my formatting codes - then, I replace the html codes with the appropriate codes for PageMaker in the past, now for InDesign. This is to say that the html export is perfectly “readable” for import usage, whilst using the .rtf format is often asking for trouble. Wysiwyg in your outliner is often .rtf-based, but then html export is the perfect format for replacing the wysiwyg by dtp codes, similar for footnotes and such - which means no outliner ever needs a “footnote” functionality since this can be simulated by such codes. The real problem, as said elsewhere in this forum, is the missing cross-referenciality in outliners: You can do something with external macros, as said, but having such a functionality in-built, would be extremely useful.

Anyway, there are some interesting ebook creators out there, and if the transition of your outliner data into their outlines is done smoothly, executables created by such ebook creators could be the very best possible solution here… if there is a solution for the 2-columns layout at least in cases where you really need it.