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how to format towards an ebook (and a printed copy)?

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First of all I'm no where near ebook stage but I wanted to be sure the work I'm doing is headed that direction.

I'm gathering a group of photos and letters together from scans as a genealogical record for family.

LibreOffice is working fine for this and I'm learning as I go but wanted to be sure in the end that I have it in a readable form for those I share it with electronically.

I also plan to print out just a very few.

I have the pages set at half sheet size, 8.50" by 5.50" as that is the size I want for printed copies...chap book size.

It's one of those situations where I don't know what I don't know

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Nancy Reading

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What a great idea!

My mum did a family tree book a few years ago - just back three generations or so. She just used one of the online photo book templates and actually printed them out for me and my sisters (My younger sisters were also involved in the project)
It inspired me to do more family research which was great fun, but I have now let my memberships lapse as the progress had slowed....I was wondering how to record the information gathered....

this thread might help get you started.

How Permies works: https://permies.com/wiki/34193/permies-works-links-threads
My projects on Skye: The tree field, Growing and landracing, perennial polycultures, "Don't dream it - be it! "

Leigh Tate

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posted 3 months ago

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Judith, what form do you want the final eBook to be in? PDF? epub?

Blog: 5 Acres & A Dream
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Judith Browning

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thanks Nancy!

This is an attempt to consolidate my mom's research into an interesting form for family.
She spent several years researching, traveling to court houses and graveyards and extensive letter writing ...all pre internet of course

So, I inherited the works...all of her working files, letters (and carbon copies of her's sent) along with tons of photos.
She also received a lot of memorabilia from relatives because they considered her the family genealogist.

She has family lineages of her parents back to late 1700's in Virginia here in the states and early 1800's from Norfolkshire England.

Thanks for the link! there is helpful information there.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

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Leigh Tate wrote:Judith, what form do you want the final eBook to be in? PDF? epub?

Leigh, That's what I don't know?
I would like it in a form that I could send electronically to family members who would probably only have a phone to read it on, some with tablets or pc's though.
The print copy will be much easier as (I think) for that I need to arrange the pages in order and, make it a pdf and the printer at our print shop prints it in book form, front and backs of pages in the correct order.

I do see that libreoffice will transform to epub or pdf and I tried each with my practice pages.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Sebastian Köln

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posted 3 months ago

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I would recommend to keep using LibreOffice and focus on the printed version first. Export that as PDF and check it looks correct.
That way there will be no surprises when you print it.

After that export as EPUB and see how bad it is.

There are two ways to format a document:
Absolute formatting: Places elements at positions on a page. Works great for printing. Total disaster for ebooks
Relative Formatting: Gives instructions how to place the elements in a given context. Looks different every time, but that allows it to adapt to different screens, fonts and user preferences.
That includes:
- align left, center, right
- page break, line break (use carefully and only when there is a semantic need for one, such as before a new chapter or paragraph). If used to format paragraphs it will break horribly.

Keep the default paragraph style (heading 1, heading 2, paragraph), or modify them. Do not format text directly with a given font or font-size.

ebooks (epub) are basically web-sites, but with less features and on outdated devices.

EDIT: For the PDF export: In the export window select under Image settings: 600dpi, quality 98%. Or Lossless and don't reduce resolution. The default settings will give you small files, but the quality is less than perfect.

Judith Browning

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thank you Sebastian for such helpful and very clear guidelines!

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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posted 3 months ago

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Judith, I think this is such a great project. The older I get, the more I realize how important it is to preserve family history.

One thing I can suggest, is to pay attention to page design details. The difference between a professional looking publication and an amateurish looking one is consistency in the details. Style varies and is a matter of taste, but if the pages are all formatted the same, it gives a polished look to it.

I'm going to guess that PDF will be more useful, especially since different eReaders render the book differently. It will be a treasured resource for your family.

Blog: 5 Acres & A Dream
Books: Kikobian Books | Permies Digital Market

Judith Browning

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thanks Leigh!

It seems like I'm spending as much or more time learning the 'how to' part as sorting and editing the pictures...letters will be harder as some have more interesting information than others so I'll need to read many of them again.

I think I can only do this in small doses but has been a nice project in the heat of the afternoon in front of the fan...this week we are in the nineties 🌞🌞🌞

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

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I need some thoughts about photo placement...
I would like one per page...there will be a small amount of text eventually, mostly names and dates and relationships.
This photo is of a small section of pages I'm working on, still rearranging and sizing pictures (mom and others)

So far I've kept them all oriented the same direction but now I'm wondering if I could reorient the landscape photos so that they can be enlarged also or if that's an awkward thing to have to turn a book ( or phone) frequently?

I haven't been able to size them all the same on the pages although I'd like to try that I think...have not found 'how to' and doing it to each photo is difficult, especially as they are not the same ratio...so maybe that wouldn't work anyway...maybe all the same distance from the top?

I did only .25" margins and the pages are 5.50" by 8.50" the size of a standard sheet of paper folded.

I can't remember the dpi that the photos and letters were scanned in at. I probably just used what the printer suggested so some may look better smaller anyway.

I'm fighting the placement 'anchor' on each page to size and place images.

editing to add thoughts as I think them for later reference

IMG_20250621_135000_723-2.jpg

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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posted 2 months ago

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Judith Browning wrote:I need some thoughts about photo placement...

Judith, are you using a photo editor? That will help. I use Gimp because Libreoffice doesn't seem to resize images satisfactorily. I can give you a couple of things that I do, if it helps.

For print, photos need to be 300 ppi. Otherwise they will print fuzzy. Gimp will do this for you under Image > Scale Image where you can change the X and Y resolutions to 300 ppi. Do this first. (hit save)

Then, for a book (either print or PDF), I resize the image using the inches measurement. Image > Scale Image > Image Size (change from px to inches). With quarter inch margins, you could make the width as much as 5 inches.

The challenge with this, is if the originals were say, 72 ppi and you increase to 300, it will shrink the size of the image. When you make it a larger input size, the image will look blurrier on your computer screen. But usually, it still prints out fine! Do some test prints to make sure you're happy with the results and to get an idea of what happens.

The other thing to know, is that if you do this with the photos, it increases the byte size of your document. Not a problem for printing it out, but it will make a much larger file for device viewing.

Caveat - make sure the printer will recognize quarter-inch margins!

When I open a photo in libreoffice, I find I need to put the cursor on the line I want and then center it as if it's for text. I can't get an image to center properly if I don't do this first.

To anchor in Libreoffice, I choose "as character." That sets the image in the proper place without doing weird things with the text. I can still add text underneath.

Whether to leave them all oriented as is (portrait or landscape) is a matter of preference. I think turning the book to view a larger size isn't a bother. I'd put all these together, probably. If you think you want to leave your landscape pics as is, I'd be tempted to experiment with two on a page, unless I had a lot of text to add. It helps to give it a test run with a draft to see what you like best.

Of course, there are more than one way to do all this! But as a fellow learn-as-you-go book maker, this is what has worked for me.

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Judith Browning

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posted 2 months ago

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thank you Leigh!!!

So much helpful information.

I do have gimp and have been lazy about editing there but have planned to...It's been awhile since I used it to resize photos so will be a whole learning curve once again.

The anchor thing was becoming an annoyance so that advice was especially helpful.

I like learning something new although by the time I get to it in the afternoon it's hot and I'm tired and brain function is not optimum 🫤

When I scanned in these old photos I'm really not sure what dpi I used...pretty sure it was more than was suggested by the scanner but now I wonder if I should rescan?

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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posted 2 months ago

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Judith Browning wrote:thank you Leigh!!!

. . .

When I scanned in these old photos I'm really not sure what dpi I used...pretty sure it was more than was suggested by the scanner but now I wonder if I should rescan?

Judith, I'm happy to be of help!

For the photos, try a test print and see what you think. It's nice you can rescan if you need to.

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Judith Browning

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I hope this has a simple answer

I'm lost in scanning settings....

I am going for the highest dpi offered which is 600.

Then I can also choose:
JPEG/Exif
TIFF
PNG
PDF

...for documents and photos separately.

If I'm exporting the finished book to pdf in the end is there any reason to do that now?
Which might be better for the end result?

I'm trying each (just between pdf and jpeg) with some photos and can't tell any difference and have no ink to print out a test copy.

thanks 💜

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Sebastian Köln

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Maximum Resolution TIFF, unless you run out of space on your computer.

Thom Bri

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Just to say I used Libre Office to write a novel I sell on Amazon and it worked without a hitch. You don't need to pay a lot of money for a good result.

Judith Browning

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Sebastian Köln wrote:Maximum Resolution TIFF, unless you run out of space on your computer.

I scanned a number of old photos yesterday as TIFF.
Then when I checked the space used in the folder I saw a bit over 1GB for 27 scans.

I have the space both as storage on the laptop and on a flash drive although this 'book' is going to be almost entirely scanned photos and letters.

I also noticed things got really sluggish when I copied the folder to flash drive.

Maybe I need a compromise where the quality is 'good enough'?

Judith Browning

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Thom Bri wrote:Just to say I used Libre Office to write a novel I sell on Amazon and it worked without a hitch. You don't need to pay a lot of money for a good result.

That's good to know Thom!
Yours is an ebook?
Do you know the size in GB?

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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Judith Browning wrote:I am going for the highest dpi offered which is 600.

Judith Browning wrote:Maybe I need a compromise where the quality is 'good enough'?

600 dpi is really high and more than what you need even for a print book. Try it at 300 dpi, which is what is usually recommended for print. (eBooks are typically 72 dpi for images).

Also, different image formats will yield different sizes. TIFFs will produce the largest files and JPEGs the smallest, in terms of MB.

I've done all my print books with JPGs at 300 dpi and had very nice results.

Blog: 5 Acres & A Dream
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Judith Browning

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thanks again Leigh!

I was just looking again at my scans from yesterday and am so happy and relieved to to see your reply here!

I think my computer is not up to the task of high dpi scans...opening the folder and also individual pictures is very slow.

I'm fairly certain that the pictures and letters I scanned several years ago are jpeg at 300dpi so I'll just continue at that.

I want this as nice as possible but would like to finish before this old computer gives out...or for that matter before I give out 🙃

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

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I am trying to understand some things in gimp when I'm resizing photos so am attaching a few here to see how they show up.

I'm not even sure what my question is yet🫤

image000000-(1).jpg

image000003.jpg

image000000-(2).jpg

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Nancy Reading

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Some old photo original prints are tiny - it may be worth doing those in higher dpi, then if they are enlarged to fit the pages they will have as much definition as you want. Larger photos can have less definition and still produce good results....

That was a bit convoluted! I hope it made sense.

How Permies works: https://permies.com/wiki/34193/permies-works-links-threads
My projects on Skye: The tree field, Growing and landracing, perennial polycultures, "Don't dream it - be it! "

Leigh Tate

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Judith, what wonderful photos. 300 dpi makes the details stand out nicely. Have you tried printing them out yet? I find my images turn out very different in print than on a digital screen.

Have you tried any of Gimp's photo enhancement tools? I took the liberty of using 'curves' and 'brightness-contrast' on this one. It might look different in print, however.

Judiths-image000000-Gimp-tweaked.jpg

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Judith Browning

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wow! that's much improved!
I need to not open my laptop until this afternoon otherwise I miss a nice cool morning in the garden🙄 but I am anxious to try that on other photos.
I have not tried 'curves' in gimp and would not have guessed it's usefulness....I used to have an off line 'how to' I think?

I have not tried printing anything out as I don't have ink here at home.
can do that next town trip.

Nancy, by tiny do you mean measurement or computer storage?
I don't understand why some that measure in inches smaller than others, such as the center one I posted, look the same size when I posted them here?

By the way, that one is a rare smiley one of my grandma...I've always wondered who was taking the photo?

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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Judith Browning wrote:By the way, that one is a rare smiley one of my grandma...I've always wondered who was taking the photo?

It's a beautiful picture! I love the smile. I'm always amazed that people in old photos didn't smile like we do. Must have been the style at the time.

I don't know if you've found it yet, but Gimp will tell you the print size in inches of any photo via image menu > print size.

Another thought (just what you need, right?) you can crop these if you want to. I'd be tempted to crop off the top of the one of your grandmother, to balance the space above and below the figure in the pic.

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Judith Browning

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Leigh, you've inspired me to spend some time playing around with some of these pictures on gimp...I opened the tutorial on my phone so have been 'studying' this afternoon.
I'm a slow learner.

One thing I noticed is if I lighten things up too much all of the spots and stains show up even more. I know I could zoom in and clean up some of that but do I want to? I don't think so.....so will find some compromises I think.

Because this phone is not compatible with my adapter for the usb port to connect the flash drive I'm working from I have to use our old phone and send them to me in a text message in order to post here...too complicated to do very often🙄so I'll wait until I've got the laptop at the library.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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Fellow slow learner here.

I find the best way to learn is by experimenting and practicing, just like you're doing.

If you look at the Gimp menus, filters > enhance, you'll find a bunch of photo clean-up stuff you can try. I'm not sure I ever figured out how to use them properly, but it's worth playing around with them. On the other hand, you're working are old photos, so I doubt anyone will expect them to look new.

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Sebastian Köln

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The reason to scan at the maximum possible quality, is that once information is lost, it can't be recovered. The only way to fix it, is to scan the picture again.
That being said, with a trained eye, you can see the resolution of the picture and then set the scan resolution to be roughly twice that, but even moderate quality prints should have 300 DPI or more, meaning scanning at 600 DPI is required to no loose details.

There are two classes of image compression:
- lossless. (TIFF, PNG). The original image can be reconstructed perfectly.
- lossy (JPEG, WEBP) The image does not contain the full information. "information of lesser visual importance" is thrown away (details in dark areas, colors are stored at half the resolution). These cannot be edited because any editing will make the compression artifacts visible.

When the picture is edited and placed in the book at whatever size it happens to be, during the PDF export step, the picture is scaled down and compressed to the appropriate level.

Judith Browning

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Thanks Sebastian!
I'm convinced

I just don't know how to get around the sluggishness of the laptop I'm working on when I scan at 600dpi....thoughts?

I do want the best quality that I can manage with the tools that I have.

Very best for this project might be going with a physical book of the originals tucked into sleeves and give it to the first grandchild who shows an interest 🙃 and I'll likely do that also but for now I would like something reproducible and that might suit their personal tech choices.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Sebastian Köln

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You could create lower resolution copies of each image and use those for the layout. When everything is ready, right-click on each image and select "replace".

Sebastian Köln

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This is using Darktable. I cropped the picture a bit to center her and remove the blown out areas.

image000003.jpg

Judith Browning

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thanks Sebastian!
That photo is much improved...lightened up nicely so even the texture of her coat shows.

The collection of pictures ranges from studio shots to grandma's home developed ones to those from glass plates to those printed on postcards...so some are mich sharper than others but some of the blurry fading ones are my favorites.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Jane Mulberry

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Judith, it's going to be a beautiful project!

One thing you mentioned that I wanted to comment on is the 1/2" margins. Margin sizes don't matter for ebooks, but they do for paper books, and the more pages in the book, the more they matter! I'm not sure how many pages the project will end up being, but even for a smaller number of pages, a 1/2" may not be enough and a wider centre margin will make the images easier to look at.

I always do my paperbacks with mirrored margins. Imagine the pages you've completed made into a book. Page 1 will be the first page, on the right hand side once the cover is opened. The left hand side of pages that will be on the right and the right hand side of pages that will be on the left side need to be wider than the margins that will be on the outside page edges of the printed book. There's a table for minimum margin width at the end of this page on paperback formatting for Amazon: https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/GVBQ3CMEQW3W2VL6

Even if you're not having them made up as an actual paperback book, you'll probably want to put the paper printed version into some sort of binder or folder, and the inside margins need to make allowance for whatever width the binder needs. They are likely to need to be wider than the minimum for paperbacks, depending how you plan to put the paper copies together.

Libre Office has a page layout setting that allows you to set mirrored margins if you decide to use them.

I'm only 65! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Judith Browning

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thank you so much Jane!
actually, for some reason, I set the margins at a quarter inch, even less than a half inch!
I saw the mirrored margin option and did not know what it meant so appreciate the suggestion and explanation.
I will plan to do that!

What added margin for center binding allowance do you think?

With all of my new knowledge from this thread I think it best if I start fresh and not try to correct things in the document I've been working on.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Jane Mulberry

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posted 2 months ago

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The inside margin width (the technical term is "Gutter", open a paperback and you can see why!) depends how you intend to bind the final paper version, so you'll need to decide that first.

If you're putting them in a binder where you slip each two pages back to back into a plastic sleeve, then margin doesn't matter at all, you could stay with your 1/4". That keeps it simple! If you want to punch holes in the pages and put them in a ring binder or use those binders that slide a plastic clip along the length of the spine, they'd need at least an inch, possibly more. Binders are usually standard sizes, so you might consider changing the paper size to whatever binder size you choose.

Or if you want to get it made up as a print-on-demand paperback by Amazon, Lulu, or similar (you don't need to leave it on sale, you can just order "author copies" at a discounted price then unpublish it) use the Amazon chart I linked to. Or your printer may have some way of binding them for you. In that case, check what page and margin sizes they recommend.

It does sound like a wonderful project and a real gift to your family!

I'm only 65! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Kat Wilson

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Location: Florida, USA

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Thank you for posting this thread and thank you Jane for all your valuable information and links. I have been writing a book that my sister started before she passed away in April and so I spent the day on the kdp.amazon site link formatting it. Even though I had to start the book from scratch, since she couldn't remember where her notes were, it is about our life as Irish twins, so I have to rely on my memory now. This was a godsend. I cannot thank you enough. Still aways from publishing but having the proper format going forward will save me a lot of time.

Have a Great Day!
Kat

Jane Mulberry

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I'm glad I could provide some info to help, Kat!

Remember, ebooks don't need much formatting, they should be kept simple because the ereader does the formatting. It's only print books that are trickier and are best saved as a pdf to keep the formatting. Though if the book isn't for publishing, but for giving to family members, then the print pdf can also be read as an ebook.

This option wouldn't work so well for Judith's book, as I think from what she's said it's mostly images, if your book is mostly text, you can make things even easier by using a no-cost publishing site like Draft 2 Digital to formal both ebooks and paperbacks at no cost. They're a good indie publishing platform that makes it easy to get books for sale on most of the non-Amazon sites, and they have a decent free automated formatting tool. You don't have to commit to publishing the book with them to use the formatter, they are fine with authors just using it, downloading the files, and stopping before hitting publish. But if you want to have the book available for sale, they are also a good option and very author-friendly.

If your book has a lot of images, then their automated formatter might mess with things too much, so what you're doing formatting it manually will work best.

I hope you find peace and joy as you complete the project.

I'm only 65! That's not to old to learn to be a permie, right?

Judith Browning

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Kat,
what a sweet and wonderful legacy for you and your sister💜

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Judith Browning

Posts: 9657

Location: Ozarks zone 7 alluvial, clay/loam with few rocks 50" yearly rain

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I thought I had a lot of questions so I first reread this thread and find most of them answered!
The one that I'm still curious about is how best to send a pdf electronically? size limits?
I know a text attachment has a very low megabite limit as does email.
I'm no where near that point although I'd like to share with a cousin as I go along for input on family history.

"We're all just walking each other home." -Ram Dass
"Be a lamp, or a lifeboat, or a ladder."-Rumi
"It's all one song!" -Neil Young

Leigh Tate

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Judith, size limits will depend on the email service. Something like google drive offers a way to share larger files. Or maybe another cloud service. Maybe someone will have a suggestion. Another thing you could do is put it on a thumb drive and send that.

Blog: 5 Acres & A Dream
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