Skip to content

Publishing_from_GoogleDoc.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
266 lines (171 loc) · 16.4 KB

Publishing_from_GoogleDoc.md

File metadata and controls

266 lines (171 loc) · 16.4 KB
Raw

Guide on converting a Google Docs document into an eBook (well-structured PDF and EPUB files)

While it is convenient to write a book in Google Docs, transforming it into a high-quality eBook is complicated. Please find below the steps which one should take to make a pair of PDB and EPUB files from a Google Docs document using free software.

Why Google Docs

I used Google Docs for writing a compendium which contained hundreds of pages, hundreds of diagrams, and thousands of cross-links.

Benefits

  • Online collaboration
  • Decent UX
  • Decent stability (few bugs, no data corruption)
  • Performance (Google Docs seems to be faster than LibreOffice Writer)
  • Instant backup
  • You probably don't need to learn it

Drawbacks

  • Supports only basic editing
  • Exporting is basic as well
  • No integration with version control systems
  • Unavailable offline

The troubles you may encounter

  • Google Docs has a hard time saving the table of contents into a PDF (as an outline) or EPUB file. Older versions did not generate it at all, whilst the newer ones may be buggy and provide next to no control over the structure of the table of contents.
  • The resulting EPUB is not optimized. It may take too long to open and section breaks may be at the wrong granularity level.

Use specialized software

It makes sense to rely on specialized tools:

  • Google Docs for editing and collaboration
  • Calibre for conversion to EPUB
  • LibreOffice for conversion to PDF

UPDATE: It is possible to edit the outline of a PDF file generated by Google Docs, see below. This saves you from much editing in LibreOffice.

Exporting from Google Docs to LibreOffice Writer

Even though Google Docs and LibreOffice Writer are about the same thing, they differ in many details. I suppose that you have perfected your book in Google Docs and now want it to look the same in the output PDF file.

So you just go to File -> Download -> OpenDocument Format (.odt) in your Google Docs, wait for the download to complete, open the downloaded document with LibreOffice and compare it to the original. I looked at the lengths of the documents - they should match. If they don't, you should probably check the length of every chapter to find the differences. A few hints are below:

UPDATE: Google Docs became too slow to generate an .ODT from my book. It fails silently (the file is never downloaded). I have to download it as a .DOCX, open the DOSX with LibreOffice and save it as an .ODT file.

Fonts

The Google Docs set of fonts differs from that in OpenOffice Writer. I used Oswald in the explanation sections of my book only to find out that LibreOffice Writer silently replaces it with a default font.

Therefore, please check all kinds of text styles which you use throughout your book. If anything looks wrong, you may have to download a corresponding font from Google and install it on your computer.

Document structure

Google Docs uses header text style for chapters and sections. With LibreOffice Writer styles and structure are separate.

You will need to:

  • open the "Styles and Formatting" right-side panel and right-click and Modify... the header styles there or
  • right-click on each kind of header in your document and choose Paragraph -> Edit Style... to set up the outline levels. The outline levels are set up in the Outline & List paragraph style tab.

For example, in my book there are:

  1. Title style for book parts - it gets outline level 1
  2. Heading 1 style for chapters - outline level 2
  3. Heading 2 style for groups of sections - outline level 3
  4. Heading 2 style for individual sections - outline level 4

Please be aware that now your book's title or blank lines from the title page may appear as stray chapters in the table of contents, unless you change their styles to default and set up their font sizes manually.

Orphaned lines

NOTE: You don't need this and the following sections if you generate the PDF with Google Docs because EPUB does not preserve the formatting of the ODT.

Google Docs prevents single lines of text from appearing at the top or bottom of the page. LibreOffice Writer has two controls for that: Orphan control and Widow control. Both are in the Text Flow tab of the paragraph style dialog.

You have to enable both of them for the default paragraph style. Please note that they are already enabled for headings.

There is also a subtle difference in the logic of the feature: while Google Docs keeps a header, diagram, and the following caption line together, LibreOffice Writer does not consider them to be a single paragraph, thus you may see a caption separated from its diagrams or a section header together with a diagram separated from the section's text. Fixing that will likely require manual changes which may be as simple as inserting a blank line before every diagram with a caption.

Tables

Google Docs seems to generate tables with no padding. While the tables look good in Google Docs, in LibreOffice Writer the spacing between cells is smaller than the spacing between lines of text inside a cell.

Thus you may need to increase padding in the Table Properties -> Borders dialog for each table in your document. There seems to be no easy way to select all the tables - you'll have to edit each of them manually.

Transparency

I used transparency to reduce the contrast of the background image on the title page of my book. LibreOffice Writer does not support transparency for images, only for page areas. I had to delete the cover image and re-insert it through Page Style -> Area -> Image to make it semi-transparent via Page Style -> Transparency.

Bullets and fonts

If you use multiple fonts in a list, the list's bullets will differ in size. You'll need to left-click a bullet (this selects all the bullets in the list) and choose a font which will apply to all the bullets.

Known bugs

There are several LibreOffice Writer bugs (as of 7.3.7.2) that cause inconveniences:

  • Recovery of a document after a crash may corrupt suggestions - additions become deletions. This is a point against offline collaboration via ODT files.
  • Autosave (recovery backup) cannot be disabled via Options -> Load/Save -> General -> Save AutoRecovery information. This is really annoying for large documents as the saving takes half a minute and happens every 10 minutes.
  • Paragraph Style -> Text Flow -> Keep with next paragraph setting is not applied when a document is loaded. Opening the style dialog for a header and just pressing OK will reformat the document and may change its number of pages and the PDF output.
  • A saved document includes international fonts by default, which adds tens of megabytes to the document's size. This can be disabled in the File->Properties->Font tab.

Exporting to a PDF

There are two options now:

  • Save the Google Docs document as a PDF and edit its outline (table of contents)
  • Generate the PDF file from the ODT edited in LibreOffice.

Save the PDF in Google Docs and edit its outline

File -> Download -> PDF Document (.pdf) in Google Docs creates the PDF. It looks exactly as the original Google Doc, yet you may still want to edit its outline (table of contents):

  • Run pdftk <your_file>.pdf dump_data > outline.txt
  • Edit outline.txt with a text editor, possibly using its find/replace functionality to group-change outline levels. Please note that skipping outline levels (placing a level 3 item directly under a level 1 header) does not work.
  • Reintegrate the changes by running pdftk <your_file>.pdf update_info outline.txt output <new_file>.pdf

Generate with LibreOffice

This is straightforward:

  • Run File -> Export As -> Export as PDF... in LibreOffice Writer.
  • Be sure that the Archive (PDF/A, ISO 19005) box is checked.
  • The Export outlines checkbox is responsible for creation of the table of contents.

Now you have your PDF with a nice table of contents!

Making a EPUB

This part is complicated.

You will probably want to make a copy of your document as the steps below involve destructive modifications.

Get rid of the title page

The EPUB includes the cover as a stand-alone image. Therefore you should delete the cover page from your document to avoid its being duplicated. Which is not that easy because the title page's properties differ from those of other pages, therefore merely deleting the cover page's text and image does not work - the second page becomes the new title page.

I found the following workaround:

  • Delete the contents of your title page. Your second page will become your title page.
  • Select Format -> Title Page... -> Make Title Pages -> Insert new title pages. Press OK - that should insert a blank default-style title page in front of the document
  • Now delete the newly inserted blank lines to pull the text from your second page into the first page.
  • Save the updated document.

Generate the cover image

Now you need to create the cover (printout of your title page) for your EPUB. There are two ways:

  • KISS: Make a screenshot of your title page in Google Docs or LibreOffice Writer.
  • The knightly path: Extract it from the PDF file generated in the previous section. Assuming you are on Linux, run pdftoppm -singlefile -png YourBook.pdf > Cover.png

NOTE: The cover may contain white pixels on the right side if the cover image's dimensions did not perfectly match the page dimensions. In that case you will have to crop the resulting PNG file, for example convert Cover.png -crop 1240x1755+0+0 CroppedCover.png where 1240 and 1755 are the width and height of the resulting image, and 0s are the coordinates of the top left corner of the area to crop.

Create the EPUB

You will need Calibre. Install it.

  • Open your ODT file without the title page with Calibre (that should be possible through right-clicking the file and choosing Open with other application).
  • Right-click on the newly created book in Calibre's library (its main page) and select Edit metadata -> Edit metadata individually.
    • Set the book's cover from the image generated in the previous step.
    • Fill in the title and author(s).
    • You can add tags, but I don't know if they appear in the published book, or are internal to Calibre.
    • Apply the changes.
  • Right-click on your book. Convert books -> Convert individually.
    • Choose ODT as input and EPUB as output format.
    • Fonts tab of the Look and Feel dialog:
      • Check Embed all fonts
      • Check Subset all embedded fonts
    • There is some magic under the Structure detection dialog:
      • Detect chapters works with //*[name()='h1' or name()='h2' or name()='h3' or name()='h4'] - This probably is related to the table of contents. Calibre's table of contents is limited to 3 levels, however.
      • Insert page breaks before should detect every kind of section if we want every section to appear on a new page: //*[name()='h1' or name()='h2' or name()='h3' or name()='h4'].
    • The Table of Contents dialog also needs your attention:
      • Change the Number of links to add to a big number like 500.
      • The levels are required for a multi-level (hierarchical) table of contents:
      • Set Level 1 TOC to //*[name()='h1']
      • Set Level 2 TOC to //*[name()='h2']
      • Set Level 3 TOC to //*[name()='h3']
      • Check Manually fine-tune the ToC after conversion.
    • Click OK and wait for a couple of minutes.
    • Enjoy the preview of your table of contents. You can edit it manually or delete and regenerate it with the buttons on the right side of the dialog.
      • Alternatively, you can delete the generated table of contents by pressing Ctrl+A and del and create a new full-depth table of contents by using the Create table of contents from all headers button (and choosing Include duplicates if a pop-up appears). This allows for making a 4-level table of contents and also adds introductory sections.
    • If you work on the table of contents for a couple of minutes, there will appear a pop-up warning about a ToC creation timeout. It is safe to ignore.
  • Right-Click on your book. Choose Open containing folder. Enjoy the EPUB you've created!

Issues with Calibre's EPUB

There are a couple of troubles with the Calibre's output:

  • It uses <class="calibre"> in a non-standard place which results in errors from EPUB validation tools. If your publisher insists on fixing the errors (PublishDrive does), you should:
    • Install Sigil.
    • Open the EPUB with Sigil.
    • Find class="calibre"> and replace it with > throughout the EPUB contents (All HTML Files).
  • Lists are not well-aligned. Fixing that requires knowledge of CSS:
    • Edit the EPUB (right-click on the EPUB in the main Calibre window and choose Edit EPUB format or call the Calibre's EPUB editor from the file explorer.
    • Find a page with a list (or a nested list if you use them).
    • Click on the text of a list item in the preview panel. Its HTML code will become highlighted in the XHTML editor.
    • Check which class its <p> (paragraph with text) element uses. In my case the top-level list is class="p-p1" while the nested list items are of class="p-p10". You will have to fix both of them.
    • Open stylesheet.css in the file browser panel.
    • Edit the definitions of the classes used with the list items. I had text-indent: -0.25in; margin: 0 0 0 0.5in; and text-indent: -0.25in; margin: 0 0 0 0.75in;. Set everything to zero: text-indent: 0; margin: 0 0 0 0;
    • The preview should look much better now.
    • Repeat for any misaligned page elements.
    • Save the EPUB document.
  • Fonts don't fit in their lines, resulting in cropped letters. This is reproducible only in the Ebook viewer, not in Calibre Editor:
    • Edit the EPUB.
    • Find the paragraph which does not look good in the viewer.
    • Edit its <span> class, in my case s-t5. I had to change line-height from 1.2 to 1.4 for Oswald font to be displayed correctly.
  • You may also need to edit the table of contents in the editor. It's the top item of the Tools menu.
  • Colors of the cover image may be strongly distorted due to the JPEG compression:
    • Edit the EPUB.
    • In the file browser panel scroll down to the Images section. There should be the cover file at the end of it. Right-click it and Replace ... with file .... Choose the original cover image.
    • Save the EPUB.

    • Please note that replacing the cover image should be the last action to take because opening an EPUB file with Calibre editor recompresses its cover.

Publish the book

I tried Leanpub (PDF and EPUB) and PublishDrive (EPUB only).

PublishDrive is stringent on errors. You will need to fix the EPUB created by Calibre (see above).

Leanpub accepts everything, but it has a couple of peculiarities:

Generating the table of contents for Leanpub

Leanpub expects you to generate the table of contents of your book as a HTML list. You will need to do the following:

  • Open your EPUB (3 ToC levels) or PDF (4 ToC levels but it may take forever to open) file with Calibre's E-book viewer.
  • Right-click on the table of contents in the viewer and select Copy Table of Contents to clipboard.
  • Paste the table of contents into your favorite plain text editor and save it as a TXT file. You may also edit the contents if needed.
  • Download my converter (a tiny Python script) and run it: ./toc_to_html.py toc.txt toc.html
  • Open the generated HTML file with a plain text editor and copy-paste its contents into your book's Leanpub page.

Generating a sample chapter

You will probably want Leanpub to offer prospective readers to download a sample chapter from your book. However, that requires you to prepare the corresponding PDF and EPUB files:

  • Clone the book in Google Docs
  • Edit the cover
  • Delete everything except the table of contents, the chapter you will use for promotion and, probably, a few appendixes.
  • Unlink any cross-references to the deleted chapters throughout the remaining text, including the table of contents.
  • Download the sample as ODT.
  • Repeat all the steps which you did for your book:
    • Fix the ODT with LibreOffice Writer.
    • Convert it to PDF.
    • Convert it to EPUB with Calibre.

That's it. Enjoy your book.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any improvements for this instruction.

A version of this guide with screenshots is available on Medium.