Creating Great Ebooks Using Jutoh
A complete guide to making ebooks for Kindle, iPad, Sony Reader, Nook and more, from new project to publication
by Julian Smart
Published by Anthemion at Smashwords
Copyright Julian Smart 2012
Edition 1.2
All rights reserved. You are welcome to redistribute this book in its original form.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work.
This book was created using Jutoh.
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
Conventions and terms used in this book
Chapter 1: Introduction to Ebooks and Jutoh
What kinds of book can be created with Jutoh?
Chapter 3: The Jutoh User Interface
Customising the user interface
Chapter 4: Working With Projects
Creating and deleting documents
Importing into an existing project
Chapter 6: Editing and Formatting Content
The basics of formatting using named styles
Applying styles using shortcuts and favourites
Chapter 7: Editing Your Book’s Metadata
Viewing the generated metadata
Chapter 8: Creating Your Cover Design
The cover page versus the cover image
Cover display on different devices
Chapter 9: Understanding Configurations
Chapter 10: Troubleshooting Your Book
Third-party troubleshooting tools
Chapter 11: Working With Pictures
Inserting and editing pictures
Importing pictures from ODT and HTML
Chapter 12: Working With Indexes
Creating an advanced table of content
Specifying and stripping link styling
Creating a table of contents manually
Creating an alphabetical index
Creating footnotes and endnotes
Chapter 13: Working With Style Sheets
Importing and exporting style sheets
Using styles to change ebook content
Chapter 14: Working With String Tables
How to add an ISBN to your books
How to specify which sections will be included in the ebook
Removing underlining from links in HTML-based formats
Chapter 16: Understanding Ebook Formats and Platforms
Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF)
Caveats about using multiple distribution platforms
Chapter 17: Marketing Your Book
Step 2: Be able to talk confidently about it
Step 3: Find your Special Subject – be an expert or an enthusiast
How to use Jutoh with an external drive
Using a mobile drive for settings
Running Jutoh from a mobile drive
Conversion and checking applications
Customising shortcuts and favourites
From the Horse’s Mouth
“We hit the Google trail in search of e-book enlightenment. If it wasn’t for Jutoh, we’d still be in the dark.”
– Australian Financial Review, July 27th, 2010 (“Jutoh writes a new chapter in the manual of e-publishing”)
“Jutoh is a remarkable program. In a complex field it offers a simple-to-use interface with generous options and faultless performance. It accepts a wide variety of input files and can create MOBI, EPUB and other standard ebook formats. It compiles and checks projects and links to preview software. It also allows for extensive metadata entry. All this in a neat and tidy presentation. When the only other options seemed to be an expensive and unnecessary outlay on something like Adobe In-Design, this came out of the blue and has answered all our prayers. I love it.”
– Ellis Delmonte, Hawkwood Books, Lincoln
“I just wanted to say your software is bloody genius. The Smashwords conversion went brilliantly... Jutoh has been a God-send and the learning curve will really pay off in the future. Having come across many many forums where new digital authors are having a painful birth in converting to the digital platform, Jutoh is something that many of them don’t know about. Your software will make a difference. My book is now live on the Amazon and Smashword sites. It reaches Apple in two weeks. Your software helped make that happen.”
– Will B.
“Jutoh is way ahead of any of the ebook editors – and I have tried a number of them, even Adobe’s InDesign.”
– Dan R.
“I just wanted to write and thank you a thousand times over for coming up with Jutoh... I can’t begin to tell you how much simple it has made my life. Create once and send out everywhere in all formats is a Godsend, and I have been able to supplement my own titles with those of others, through my publishing company. I learned a lot about proper formatting for eBooks, taking into consideration the various formats, from ePub to ODT and even plain text. I dreaded the thought of manually going through each one, only to have to wade through the inevitable feedback, in order to fix everything by trial and error. In a single evening, I was able to submit to both B&N and Smashwords, with flying colors, no less! Thank you for putting such a wonderful product together.”
– Dallas T.
“Thanks again for all the help. Jutoh is by far the best epublishing tool I’ve used so far!”
– Blaise M.
“Simply put, Jutoh is the best conversion tool out there. The user interface is very friendly, there are many extras built-in, and the documentation is thorough. Jutoh can take a very large book with many images and successfully convert to multiple ebook formats that pass the epub validation checks. Anyone who has a book in MS Word can save it to OpenOffice (which is free, and has a built-in PDF capability amongst other features) and import it to Jutoh. I have found the Jutoh developer to be extremely accessible, responsive and eager to receive feedback. This is a high-end, professional piece of software that is practically a give-away!”
– Kathy M.
“I wanted to thank you so much for the Jutoh tool! It’s been wonderful! I was so pleased with how it worked in creating a mobipocket Kindle edition of a book I’ve been writing.”
– Joshua D.
“Thank you for another quick, thorough response! Your customer service is amazing.”
– Kristine K.
Preface
Bring on the revolution
The publishing world is currently in turmoil largely thanks to the freedoms and opportunities that ebooks bring. Simultaneously freeing consumers from the physical realities of print and paper, and freeing authors from the gatekeeper mentality that has held back much good content (as well as less literary output, to be sure), the ebook phenomenon has just hit the mainstream now that ebook reader gadgets have become practical and affordable. Kindles and Sony Readers have become popular Christmas presents and each year will see more choice on offer.
To join the revolution, authors and publishers need to provide ebooks in essentially two popular formats – Epub and Mobipocket (Kindle). (Other formats, such as PDF, are sometimes used for creating ebooks but PDFs play less well on reader hardware and cannot be reformatted to adapt to reader constraints. While Jutoh can help with creating PDFs, we will concentrate on the two standard ebooks formats.) To some extent, creating an Epub or a Kindle file is a black art. You’ll find blogs and forums full of advice on using obscure XML and HTML markup. You’ll read about the hoops people are jumping through to get this or that formatting correct on iBooks or Kindle or the Sony Reader. You may see advice on editing XML to create a table of contents before adding it to an Epub zip file. For the uninitiated trawling through this information, the prospect of creating an ebook can look frankly terrifying.
Fortunately, with Jutoh it doesn’t have to be that way. You don’t have to deal with OPF files or HTML, unless your requirements are very complex; you can simply use a friendly editor tool that optimizes its output to take into account the whims of a variety of ebook reader software and hardware. Instead of hiring someone to convert your book, you can save money by using Jutoh to do it yourself – empowering you the author, in the spirit of the ebook revolution. (If you’re a publisher or consultant helping an author create ebooks, then you’ll appreciate the time-saving qualities of Jutoh just as much.) This book is here to help you learn and get the most out of Jutoh, bringing together wisdom that you might otherwise have to glean from around the web. Sometimes even Jutoh can’t entirely smooth over differences between formats, publisher requirements, and ebook reader behaviour, and these areas are documented as much as possible to save you frustration.
If you are a Jutoh user, this guide will be an adjunct to the software (version 1.52 and above) and the built-in user manual, which contains more detail, for example on each dialog presented by Jutoh. If you are thinking about using Jutoh, or are using a different method to create your ebooks, I hope you’ll still find some useful tips in these pages. Happy authoring!
Julian Smart, April 2012
About the author
Dr Julian Smart is technical director of Edinburgh-based Anthemion Software. He is the founder of the wxWidgets project, a popular construction kit for applications that run on a variety of computer platforms. Julian is the creator of Jutoh, and, with his novelist wife Harriet Smart, the Writer’s Café toolkit for writers, as well as the DialogBlocks and HelpBlocks tools for programmers.
How this book is structured
In Chapter 1: Introduction to Ebooks and Jutoh, we start off with a gentle amble around the concept of the ebook and how Jutoh relates to it. You’ll get an overview of the steps involved in overall ebook creation, with reference to those steps that Jutoh helps with.
In Chaper 2: Getting Started, we run through a simple example of creating a project and compiling an ebook. We’ll keep it very brief so you can see that Jutoh makes the simple things simple to achieve.
In Chapter 3: The Jutoh User Interface, we’ll take a look at the main elements of the Jutoh window, so you’ll know your way around. We also look at how you can customise the interface, for example defining new keyboard shortcuts and a ‘favourites’ menu.
In Chapter 4: Working With Projects, we describe what a project consists of, how to add documents to a project, and other aspects of controlling your Jutoh project.
In Chapter 5: Importing Files, we describe in detail the types of file that can be imported and how to tell Jutoh to split it into sections.
In Chapter 6: Editing and Formatting Content, you will learn all about the Jutoh editor and how to use it to edit and format text and pictures.
In Chapter 7: Editing Your Book’s Metadata, we look at ‘metadata’, the information that describes your book to the ebook reader.
In Chapter 8: Editing Your Cover Design, we put Jutoh’s built-in cover designer under the microscope. If you will only be using previously prepared artwork for your book(s), you can skip this chapter.
In Chapter 9: Understanding Configurations, the important concept of ‘configuration’ is explained and each configuration property is explained in detail.
In Chapter 10: Troubleshooting Your Book, we explain the ways in which you can check and improve your book after compiling it. If you find problems with your book, this chapter is your first port of call.
In Chapter 11: Working With Pictures, we describe various aspects of importing pictures and specifying how they will appear in the generated book.
In Chapter 12: Working With Indexes, we explain how Jutoh can help you build a table of contents, and also an alphabetical index and footnotes or endnotes.
In Chapter 13: Working With Style Sheets, you’ll learn all about styles and style sheets, which are important in formatting your document consistently.
In Chapter 14: Working With String Tables, we describe a trick for customising your books by using keywords in your content that are substituted by values that can depend on the current configuration.
In Chapter 15: Advanced Topics, we look at a variety of advanced topics, such as character encodings, embedding font and media, guide types, and more.
In Chapter 16: Understanding Ebook Formats and Platform, we describe some of the nuances of ebook formats and distribution platforms that you should be aware of.
In Chapter 17: Marketing Your Book, we take a look at various ways in which you can get your book to a wider audience.
The Glossary may be useful for getting used to various terms used within this guide and the software itself.
In Appendix A: Installing Jutoh, we look at how to install Jutoh on various operating systems.
In Appendix B: Configuring Jutoh, we describe how to configure various aspects of Jutoh, in particular useful third-party applications such as Kindlegen and EpubCheck.
Conventions and terms used in this book
The convention Menu | Command, such as View | Preferences, indicates a menu and the command on that menu.
The notation Ctrl+S refers to holding down the control key while pressing the ‘S’ key. On Mac, you can interpret this as Command+S.
Where we refer to right-clicking, if you’re on a Mac, this action will be performed by control-clicking since there’s only one mouse button.
The terms compiling, building and generating an ebook all refer to the same act of creating an ebook from the information in your project.
A context menu is the menu you get when right-clicking (or control-clicking on a Mac), or pressing the context menu button on a Windows keyboard.
Document is a general term for each separate item that can appear in a Jutoh project outline, whether it’s a chapter of your book, an embedded font, an audio file, or any other supported document type.
Book section refers to a specific kind of document in which you can edit text and graphics; it can contain a chapter, a title page, a table of contents or any individual part of a book. This may sometimes be abbreviated to section.
A dialog is a window that opens in response to some command or condition; usually (but not always) it needs to be dismissed before you can continue working in the main window. Dialogs usually have a Help button that will give more detailed information than this guide can cover.
Screenshots are taken on Windows, but the functionality is identical on Linux and Mac even if it looks slightly different.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Ebooks and Jutoh
In this chapter we explore ebook formats, and explain how Jutoh fits into the process of getting your book onto virtual shelves. We’ll take a look at how you get your content into Jutoh, and other tools that you can use alongside Jutoh.
Ebook formats
There are three major ebook formats in use today:
Epub, an open standard supported by all non-Kindle reader devices.
Mobipocket, a proprietary format specific to the Amazon Kindle but also supported on other devices.
PDF (Portable Document Format), an Adobe proprietary format supported by most devices.
There are other formats, including plain text and HTML, but the Big Three above are the important ones.
Epub is the industry standard with wide adoption, and is flexible enough for most ebook purposes. It’s basically a zip archive containing the content in XHTML form, plus ‘metadata’ that describes the content and provides navigation information. An Epub reader (such as Apple’s iBooks) should try to format the book in a standard way, but inevitably there are differences between implementations.
Amazon bought and adopted the Mobipocket format for their Kindle devices. Mobipocket is like a cut-down version of Epub: in fact the Kindlegen application used to compile a Mobipocket book uses all the same files that you see in an Epub book, distilling them to a proprietary format. However, the way a Mobipocket reader interprets the book is different from an Epub reader, with limitations on formatting that have to be borne in mind by the author, or worked around by the authoring software. Amazon’s new ‘KF8’ format will eliminate many of these limitations and Jutoh will support the format soon after the new tools are made available.
PDF has always had a strong showing in ebooks on the desktop, because it can faithfully render the layout you see in publications such as brochures, with a direct translation from a conventional word processor file. However it is less satisfactory on mobile devices, because PDFs cannot generally be ‘reflowed’ to take advantage of small screens and requests for different type size. So on a small screen you end up having to zoom in and out and pan around the document. Clearly this is not a good general solution for reading books, unless you have a device with a particularly large screen, and even then you will have trouble adjusting the type size without content either disappearing off the screen or leaving blank areas. We will not say much more about PDF in this book, but suffice it to say that if you need to support PDF, Jutoh can help you create these files by generating ODT which you can load into OpenOffice.org and from there, export to PDF.
Since Jutoh can handle all major ebook formats, it means that you can distribute your books for the Sony Reader, Apple iBooks on iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad, Amazon Kindle, any Android device, Barnes & Noble Nook, and many other devices as well as for any PC or Mac.
What is Jutoh?
Jutoh is an editor for creating your ebooks; you can create a book from scratch in Jutoh, or you can import an existing book. As we’ve seen, Jutoh can generate the major ebook formats. Unlike most word processors, Jutoh divides ebook content into sections, which is more naturally suited to the way ebooks work. Jutoh is a bit like a word processor in that it supports content formatting, but it is geared towards generating a variety of ebook formats, with various tools to help with this task. You can add images to your documents, and (experimentally) sound and video where supported by the ebook reader.
For clarity, here are some things that Jutoh is not:
Jutoh is not just a converter. Although you can import from several different file formats, it’s an editor so you can write content and apply formatting within Jutoh.
Jutoh is not an HTML editor. You can pass some raw HTML and CSS through to the finished book if you wish, but Jutoh is control of most of the HTML generation and so you can’t edit the generated HTML from within Jutoh. However there is nothing to stop you editing the intermediate files and generating the ebook manually from these; Jutoh just doesn’t encourage it.
Jutoh is not a full-blown page layout program. Don’t expect to do multiple columns, text boxes or absolute positioning of content; Jutoh is optimized for the relatively simple needs of most ebooks which are generally read on small devices with little space for elaborate formatting. Having said that, there are some tricks available if you need to go beyond Jutoh’s formatting capabilities.
Jutoh helps you create a cover page for your book with the simple cover designer, which can substitute information from the metadata (title, author and so on) into the design. Create a design from scratch, or start from one of the templates provided by Jutoh.
Jutoh has facilities for compiling a table of contents and index, and can compile references either at the end of a section or in a separate section. You can of course create links between pages, and links to external web sites.
In addition, Jutoh contains tools to help collate research that doesn’t belong in your finished book – for example text and image scraps – and has its own desktop where you can put ‘sticky’ notes, shortcuts to applications and documents, and even little image slideshows.
Jutoh works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (one licence is good for any or all platforms, which is handy if you have a variety of machines), and it can be run from a USB drive. All information for a given Jutoh project is stored within a single file with extension ‘jutoh’ which makes for easy transfer and backup.
What kinds of book can be created with Jutoh?
Jutoh is good for most book types, including:
novels;
short story collections;
biography;
self-help books;
articles;
manuals;
photographic books;
textbooks with simple layout requirements.
You can insert images into Jutoh, which can be photographic or artistic or could be used for symbols and decorative touches. You need to be aware of some limitations, however. Jutoh doesn’t yet support tables, so complex tabular layout is more difficult (though it can be done via raw HTML, or by formatting in another tool and importing as a picture). Also floating text boxes or complex rules and borders will need custom HTML/CSS or pictures to achieve. Mathematic or other formulae aren’t supported but again, can be achieved by inserting pictures. As we said earlier, don’t expect the layout of a complex word processor document to be reproduced exactly, as if exporting to PDF.
Jutoh’s output, in common with the ebooks supported by most current ebook readers, is static, and so is not like a web page with forms and multimedia. Jutoh has experimental support for audio and video but these file types are not yet recognised by a wide variety of reader hardware and software and so should be approached with caution.
The book creation lifecycle
These are roughly the steps involved in creating and distributing an ebook.
Create a project, importing an existing file if you have one.
Edit the book content, metadata and cover.
Choose a configuration (approximately equivalent to the format) and compile the ebook.
Check the file for errors, for example using using EpubCheck.
If there are errors shown by step 4, go to step 2.
Preview the file manually. If there are errors, go to step 2.
Upload to one or more web sites.
Publicise.
Bask in the adulation of your readers.
Steps 1 to 5 are supported directly by Jutoh. As you can see, there are elements of both file conversion and editing in Jutoh. If you’re really lucky, you could import a file and find there’s nothing to do except generate the ebook. Or you can create a project from scratch, and do all your editing in Jutoh (which is what I’m doing for this book). More usually, you’ll import some work you have already done, and massage the book in Jutoh until you’re happy with it, going around the loop between items 2 and 6. You’re likely to want to improve the presentation of the book by tweaking the formatting, creating a table of contents, and so on.
Because Jutoh runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, you can use most desktop or notebook machines for your editing and even switch between them, since the Jutoh file format is portable (and a single Jutoh licence is good for any operating systems you may be using). Jutoh can run from a mobile drive; you can read more about that in the Appendix and in the user manual.
A question people often ask is: “Can Jutoh create an encrypted ebook?” The short answer is No, but in fact this would be a useless feature. The sites that you will be uploading your book to requires unencrypted content, and it’s the ebook vendor site (such as Kindle, Smashwords or iBooks) that will be doing any encrypting. Unless you’re a big publishing company with a deal with Adobe, for example, you won’t be able to do any official encryption that can be recognised by any ebook readers. If you’re distributing the book yourself, probably the best policy is to make a virtue of the lack of encryption: customers tend to hate DRM (Digital Rights Management) and it restricts their freedom to use the book on different devices. So, just put a paragraph on the title page asking them politely not to copy the book in an unauthorised way. Any piracy that does happen may well boost your sales by increasing the buzz around your book. However, you can easily stop any person from freely downloading your commercial book from your own site, by signing up with a vendor service such as Plimus that serves a link to your book only after payment has been received.
How to get content into Jutoh
You can can create a blank project, add book section sections, and type away. Or, you can import existing content. This is best done when you first create the project. You can import a folder containing multiple text and HTML documents, one file per book section, or you can import a single file containing one of these formats: plain text, HTML, ODT, or Epub.
Note that Jutoh has a different internal representation from any of the formats it can import, and so it won’t preserve the document formatting 100%. This varies accord to format. With HTML and Epub import, Jutoh will read just a basic level of CSS styling and you may need to do further style and content editing after import, depending on the complexity of the original CSS and HTML.
The preferred import format is ODT (Open Document Text). You can convert Word and other documents to ODT simply by opening them in OpenOffice.org (a free download) and saving as ODT. Most style information from the ODT document will be preserved.
For import of ODT and HTML files, Jutoh will help you split the book into sections by matching against heading styles or content.
You can also import ODT, HTML and text into an existing project using the File | Import command.
For more information on importing, see Chapter 5: Importing Files.
Tools to use with Jutoh
No man is an island, and neither is Jutoh. These are some of the third-party tools you can use to help with your book creation.
EpubCheck, by Adobe, is a very useful checker for Epub files. It examines the HTML and XML files in your book and flags up errors, such as missing mandatory meta-data, ill-formed HTML, missing bookmarks, and so on. Its companion checker tool Epubpreflight does some extra checks for practical issues rather than syntactic, such as whether a single book section has too much data for mobile Epub reader software to deal with. Both tools are installed and configured by default with Jutoh; they need Java to be installed on your system. Use these checkers by clicking the Check button or by switching on “Check Epub after compiling” in the General Preferences dialog. You can get updated versions of EpubCheck from here:
http://code.google.com/p/epubcheck/
Amazon’s Kindlegen is essential if you want to create Mobipocket (Kindle) books. It’s not installed by default but you can download it from:
http://www.amazon.com/kindlepublishing
Configure Jutoh by going to the Helpers page in the Jutoh Preferences dialog and clicking on Help Me Install Kindlegen in the Helpers page or Setup dialog. Jutoh will install and configure Kindlegen for you.
To preview your Epub book, you can install Adobe Digital Editions:
http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions/
or other Epub viewer. Jutoh will launch the default application associated with the epub extension when you click on Launch. If you need to use several viewers and choose between them, you can add viewers in the Helpers page of the Jutoh Preferences dialog, by clicking on Configure, then Add. Type the name of the helper application, and browse for the command to use. Now when you click on the Launch button, Jutoh will offer you a menu of applications to use.
Similarly, to preview Mobipocket books, you can use Amazon’s Kindle for PC and Kindle for Mac:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/pc
http://www.amazon.com/gp/kindle/mac
Formatting on this software can be different from on other devices, such as the Kindle device and iPhone/iPod Touch. Instead (or as well), you can use Kindle Previewer for PC/Mac/Linux. This lets you select a number of different Kindle devices to test. However don’t rely on it; always do some testing on hardware if you can. Also, Kindle Previewer only responds to command-line arguments on Windows so cannot be used as a Jutoh helper application on other platforms such as Mac and Linux – you need to open the file from the Previewer application. Hopefully that will be fixed in future release. On Windows, you can use the Setup Wizard (available from the View menu) to download and install Kindle Previewer as well as Kindlegen.
Sony Reader Library can be downloaded from:
http://ebookstore.sony.com/download
This application will preview Epubs.
OpenOffice.org is a free download from:
It’s useful for converting Word and other word processor files to ODT for import into Jutoh. If you plan to create ODT files with Jutoh, as well, you can use OpenOffice.org to convert your books to PDF, Word and other files. And of course, you may grow to enjoy it as a regular word processor instead of using one that costs a lot of money!
Summary
We have learned a little about ebook formats, what Jutoh is, the steps involved in getting a book to the point of distribution, what files Jutoh can import, and what other tools can be used alongside Jutoh. Next, we dive into an example of creating a project and creating an ebook.
Chapter 2: Getting Started
In this chapter we’ll demonstrate how easy it is to go from an existing file to a new Jutoh project and a generated ebook. We’ll assume that you’ve installed Jutoh – see Appendix A: Installing Jutoh for details.
Creating a new project
Let’s use the supplied sample file Lena.odt as the starting point for this tutorial.
Run Jutoh and click the New button on the toolbar (or type Ctrl+N or click on File | New Project). You will be shown a wizard that will take you through file import. Here are the steps for importing it, one step per wizard page.
Step 1. Metadata
This page is for entering information about your book.
Step 1: Metadata page
Type ‘Lena’ into the Book title field, and a name into Author field. Leave the other fields as they are (you can fill them out later), and press Next.
Step 2. Project Location
Here, you can specify the project name and folder. You can leave the Book Formats as they are.
Step 2: Project Location page
Enter “Lena” into Your project name. If you wish you can change the location in Project folder. Press Next.
Step 3. Import Options
This page is for specifying various details about the import. You don’t need to change the defaults for this example.
Step 3: Import Options page
Leave these options as they are, and press Next.
Step 4. Import Method
This page lets you specify a file to import.
Step 4: Import Method page
Click on option From an existing file and browse for the file Lena.odt which you can find under Jutoh Samples in your Documents (or My Documents) folder. Then click Next.
Step 5. Single File Import
This page helps you specify how to split the book into separate sections, which you can do by specifying a heading style to identify as the chapter heading style, or heading text to match, or simply to split at page breaks.
Step 5: Single File Import page
As you can see from the preview window listing the headings in the story, Jutoh has correctly guessed the paragraph style to use for splitting the story into sections, so all you need to do is press Next.
Step 6. Cover Design
The last page in the wizard lets you choose a cover design.
Step 6: Cover Design page
You can use the default design, or click on Templates to choose another template. You can change it later. Just press Finish to complete the import.
Jutoh will now create several sections, which are shown on the left in the Projects outline window. You can click on each section name and edit the text if you wish.
Compiling the project
Now we have the book in Jutoh, we can create an ebook. In the bottom-left part of the Jutoh window you’ll see the Control Panel listing configurations. (If you don’t see the Control Panel, press Alt+7 or choose View | Control Panel).
The Control Panel
Each configuration corresponds to an ebook format. Select “Epub” if it’s not already selected, and click Compile. After it’s compiled, click Launch, and if you have an ebook viewer such as Adobe Digital Editions installed, your ebook will be shown.
Viewing the ebook in Adobe Digital Editions
If you want to compile a Mobipocket file for the Kindle store, select the ‘Mobipocket’ configuration and again press Compile. (You need to have downloaded, installed and configured kindlegen for this to work – see Appendix A: Installing Jutoh and Appendix B: Configuring Jutoh) Press Launch, and if you have installed a Mobipocket viewer application such as Kindle for PC or Mac, or Kindle Previewer for PC, it will launch to show your ebook.
You can verify that the files have been generated by clicking on the Files tab in the Control Panel. You can select a file and then click Folder if you want to see where the file is on your disk.
Summary
Ta-da! You have imported content from a file and compiled an ebook. In the next chapter, we’ll have a closer look at Jutoh’s user interface so you can get to know your way around it.
Chapter 3: The Jutoh User Interface
In the last chapter, you learned how to import a file and compile it, without getting bogged down too much in the details of the Jutoh tools. Now we’re going to take a closer look at the Jutoh main window where you will do most of your ebook work.
The Jutoh main window
Menu bar and toolbar (1)
As with most applications, Jutoh has a menu bar under the window title, containing all the commands you need to make things happen. The menus are File, Edit, Format, Tools, Document, Book, View, and Help and the groups are fairly self-explanatory. Run your mouse along the menu bar and explore these commands; as you hover over a command, a summary will be displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the window.
Under the menu bar, the toolbar contains a selection of these commands for convenience. You can change the commands on this toolbar by by right-clicking on it and selecting Customise, or selecting View | Customise Toolbars. These are the buttons available by default:
New: creates a new project, showing the New Project Wizard
for importing content or creating an empty project.
Open: opens an existing project.
Save: saves any changes in the current project.
Edit: edits the Project Properties, including metadata,
styles, covers and configurations. We’ll come to this later.
Cover: edits the ebook cover design.
Compile: compiles the ebook using the currently selected
configuration.
Check: checks an Epub using EpubCheck, listing any errors it
finds in the ebook.
Launch: launches the ebook in the default viewer application
(or a custom application that you define).
Previous: goes to the previous document in your book.
Next:: goes to the next document in your book.
Documents: shows a menu of document types to add to the
project. Normally you’ll just add Book Section documents, for
example for each chapter and the title page.
Home: goes to the Jutoh desktop, containing shortcuts to
various features and documents.
Options: shows the Preferences dialog.
Help: shows or hides the help window containing the Jutoh
manual.
Search: type text and press return to search for content in
the project.
Organizer (2)
The Organizer shows all the documents in your project, in the Projects tab. A document corresponds to a chapter or section such as a title page. You can click on each document to view and edit it. You can view multiple projects in the Organizer if you wish, though you will have to enable this first via the Preferences dialog. Documents can be dragged, to change the position in the book, and a context menu is available if you right-click over a document. We’ll go into this in more detail in Chapter 4: Working with Projects.
Next to the Projects tab are two more tabs: Favourites, and Explorer. The Favourites tool shows a list of favourite projects for quick access; you can add to or remove from this list. The Explorer tool lets you browse your disks and open projects, delete them or add to Favourites.
Control Panel (3)
The Control Panel has a Build tab which shows the current configuration (loosely, the current format to be generated), with buttons for compiling, checking and launching the book. It also shows the cover of the current project, which can be clicked to edit the design. Next to the configuration is an edit button which will show the configuration editor – giving you the ability to change various things about the way the book is generated. We will cover configurations in Chapter 9: Understanding Configurations.
The Control Panel
Next to the Build tab, the Files tab shows all the ebook files that have currently been generated for this project, regardless of format. You can view the folder containing a selected file, view the file with the appropriate helper application, or (for Epubs) examine the structure of the generated book.
Document area (4)
The bulk of the window is taken up by the document area, where you can view and edit the documents (sections) in your book. At the bottom you’ll see a row of tabs, one for each document that you’re currently editing, and also one for the Jutoh Desktop. The Desktop contains shortcuts for various Jutoh features and documentation, and it’s also a place you can add ‘sticky’ notes (as shown below), pictures, and even picture slideshows. Click on the Jutoh logo button at the bottom-left for available Desktop commands.
The Jutoh Desktop
At the top of the document area you’ll see the title for the currently-selected document. You can click on it to edit the title of the section as it appears in the outline, and in the generated book contents.
Under the title area, the book section editor shows a toolbar, which can be customised by right-clicking on the toolbar and choosing Customise.
The editor behaves in most respects like other editors and word processors you will have used, with some differences and simplifications. Formatting operations can be performed from the toolbar, Format menu, and the context menu (shown using right-click, or control-click on the Mac). Navigation around the document follows the usual pattern, for example using the control key combined with the left and right arrows to move a word at a time, and holding down shift to select text while navigating. Text editing and formatting operations can be undone and redone in the usual way. However, don’t expect the editor to be exactly like ones you have used, since it has been written from scratch especially to work on a number of different platforms.
Log window (5)
The log window displays messages when compiling or checking projects. It is automatically shown when you perform one of these operations, and you can close it again using the X in the top-right corner.
Error window (6)
The error window is shown when either Jutoh finds errors during a compile, or you perform an Epub check on a generated Epub book. If there are no errors, a green ‘tick’ will be shown. If there are errors, they are listed, and you can double-click on each to show the position of the error either within the original source, or within the HTML of the Epub book, depending on the type of error. From this you will be able to work out what you need to change in your project.
Getting help
There are various ways to get help in Jutoh.
The help window containing the Jutoh manual is shown when you click on the Help button on the toolbar, or type Ctrl+H, or use the menu command Help | Contents. Use the same command to close it again. The help window shows in the main window – if you want to close it, maximize it to take up the whole main window area, or unpin it to show it as a separate window, use the buttons at the top-right of the help window (circled in red in the picture below). If you’ve maximized it, you can use the same button to restore it back to its normal size. You can drag an unpinned help window back to the main window by moving it until a blue rectangle appears near the edge of the main window, and then dropping it. The help window itself has controls for showing or hiding the help contents, changing the text size, and navigating around the help.
Maximized help within the Jutoh window, highlighting the window management buttons
Most Jutoh dialogs have a Help button which shows the relevant help in a further dialog, and not in the main help window, so you don’t have to return from the dialog to see the help.
Also, you can use the F1 key to get help on the control that currently has the focus; on Windows, you will often see a little question-mark icon at the top of a dialog. You can click that, and then on a control, to see a tip explaining the purpose of the control.
On the main window (only), you can use the Help | Describe Window command and then click on a window to show a tip with explanation about the window, with a link to click for more information.
Project properties dialog
You’ll be using this dialog a lot, because it allows you to edit all sorts of project information, including metadata (the description of the book), formatting styles, the cover design, and (using configurations) behaviour specific to each format that you wish to generate. You can show this dialog using the Edit button on the toolbar, or the View | Project Properties menu command, or the Alt+Enter keyboard shortcut.
Project Properties dialog
Customising the user interface
These are the main options for tailoring Jutoh to your preferred way of working.
Close windows – use the X button to close panels such as the Organizer, Control Panel or Log Window. Show them again from commands on the View menu.
Rearrange tabs windows – drag a tab to the left, top, right or bottom of the window associated with the tab, to split the tabbed area and see more information at once. These changes won’t be restored on restarting Jutoh.
Add or remove toolbar buttons – right-click on a toolbar to get the customise dialog, or use View | Customise Toolbars.
Add or change keyboard shortcuts for menu commands, formatting styles, and symbols – use View | Customise Shortcuts. This interface is also used for adding menu items to the optional Favourites menu on the formatting toolbar – check Favourite for each shortcut item to be included in the menu.
Change settings in the Preferences dialog (click the Options button on the toolbar, or View | Preferences on Windows and Linux, or Preferences on the application menu on Mac). You can choose whether to show a tip on startup, change the display language, set the width and surrounding colour of the edit window, and various other options that change the display and behaviour.
Show Jutoh full-screen. If you are short of screen space or simply want to temporarily reduce clutter, you can use F11 or the View | Full Screen command to remove the title bar, menu bar and main toolbar. Press F11 again to restore normal viewing.
For more information on customising Jutoh to suit your preferences, see Appendix B: Configuring Jutoh.
Summary
In this chapter, we’ve seen more detail about the various parts of Jutoh that allow you to work with your projects. Next, we will help you achieve mastery over your projects, including how to manage the individual documents that they contain.
Chapter 4: Working With Projects
In this chapter, we’ll get to grips with how projects and documents within them are managed. It’s worth reading so you have a model of how Jutoh will handle your material and what you are able to do within a project. When using Jutoh, if you find the way documents work confusing, you might want to come back and re-read this chapter.
Overview
A Jutoh project contains a hierarchy of documents, some of which will be used to create your ebook. A document is a piece of information such as a book section, a text note, a picture, a shortcut to a file on your local disk, or a web link. Why might you add documents that are not part of your book, I hear you asking? Well, you may have textual or pictorial research that you want to store with the project, or perhaps you want to keep a note of what ebook sites you have uploaded the book to, and when. However, you don’t have to use any other kind of document apart from the book section. The different document types are listed towards the end of the chapter.
The project is shown in the project outline window within the Organizer:
The Project Outline Window
Each document is displayed by clicking on its title in the project outline. Depending on your current settings, the document will be shown in a new tab or an existing tab in the document area. You can change this in Preferences under Project/Document Preferences, and determine which document types will be shown in separate tabs. You may prefer to reuse a tab per document to avoid having to manage a lot of tabs.
You can drag a tab to an edge of the document area to split the tabs and show multiple documents simultaneously. Drag the tab back next to another tab to go back to viewing one document at a time.
You can close a tab using the X button. This only closes the view of the document, and doesn’t delete it. If you right-click over a tab, you will see a menu with tab-management commands such as Close Other Tabs. This is very useful if you have a large number of tabs open.
Note that under the special Content folder, you should only create Book Section documents. Any other sort of document will be ignored, including folders.
Creating and deleting documents
If you import an existing document, Jutoh will already contain one or more book section documents. However you may wish to create further documents, or you may wish to create a project from scratch consisting of several chapters.
When you create a document, where it goes depends on what document is currently selected. If you have selected a folder, it will be added as a child of the folder. Otherwise it will be created as a sibling of the selected folder.
You can use one of the following methods for creating a new document:
Click items on the Document menu.
Use a keyboard shortcut, such as Ctrl+Alt+B to create a book section.
Click on the document button on the toolbar and choose an item from the drop-down menu. The document button looks like this:
Most frequently, you’ll be choosing Book Section from the
menu.Right-click in the project hierarchy and select New Document from the menu. Now choose your document type and title in the New Document dialog that shows.
Auto-paste by copying some data in another application, twice in quick succession (Windows only).
Now click on the title of the new document and enter the new page title.
You can delete a document by selecting in the project outline, and hitting the Delete key or right-clicking and selecting Delete. Note that this operation cannot be undone.
Moving documents
You can move a document in the project outline by dragging it to a new position using the left mouse button. If you drop the document onto a folder, the document will be placed inside the folder. Otherwise, the document will be inserted in front of the drop target. You can veto insertion into a folder by holding down the control key as you drag, and you can force adding the document as a child by holding down the shift key.
If you need finer control of where you move documents, you can use the cut and paste method. Right-click over the document you wish to move in the project hierarchy, and select Cut from the popup menu. Now go to where you wish to move the document, right-click again, and select Paste Before This Scrap, Paste After This Document or Paste As Child of this Document.
Managing project files
Each project file contains all the data needed for generating the ebook, including all book sections, style sheets, the cover design, configurations and project-wide options. You can save and open project files as you would any word processor file, and you can open multiple projects simultaneously within Jutoh if you enable the View multiple projects option in Preferences (the Project tab). This will allow you to copy and paste between projects.
As well as using the Open toolbar or file menu command, you can double-click in the list of Favourites (a tab next to the Projects tab). Or you can browse for the required project using the Explorer tool (next to Favourites). You can also use the File | Recent Projects menu. Yet another method is to double-click on the file in your operating system’s file manager, and more techie users might want to invoke Jutoh from the command line passing the project file name.
If you make a project edit, such as adding a new document or editing project properties, an asterisk will appear next to the project name in the title bar until the project is saved. If you edit an actual document such as a book section, an asterisk will appear next to the document title in the title bar. To save both document changes and any project changes, use the Save button, File | Save command, or type Ctrl+S.
By default, Jutoh will create a backup file (a file with bak appended to the name) before opening the file, so if there is a problem, you can revert to the backup. Jutoh also regularly auto-saves any data that hasn’t yet been manually saved so if there is a computer crash it can restore the data the next time you open the project. This auto-save data is stored within the original project file. However, computer software and hardware can and does go wrong, so don’t forget to back up your files frequently, preferably to multiple locations. You can use Jutoh’s own simple archiving and backup facility if you wish (see File | Manage Backups and the description in the manual) but this is not automated.
If you find your project file getting a bit big, especially after a lot of editing and deletions, you can try compacting it. In Preferences, click on Project, then on Project Maintenance. Click on the Records tab, then Delete Orphans. Click on the Project tab, and then on Compact Project. All Jutoh data is kept in database tables and as data is changed, added and deleted, the database can become fragmented, so occasional compacting is necessary, like defragmenting a hard disk.
Where is my project?
If you have opened the project using a method that didn’t require you to specify the whole file (for example, File | Recent Projects) you might not know the location of your project. To find out, just click on the Edit button (Book | Project Properties) and then click on the Info tab. This tells you the name of the project, the folder, and what version of Jutoh was used to last save it. You can click on Show Folder to show the containing folder using your operating system’s file explorer.
Document types
The following document types may be created in Jutoh. Only create book section documents under the special Content folder; but you can create any kind of document elsewhere in your project.
Book section document
A book section document represents a part of an ebook: for example, a chapter, a title page, or a table of contents. A book section document is similar to a text document, allowing styled text editing, but has its own property editor dialog with options relating to epub generation and inclusion within an ebook depending on format.
Text document
A text document lets the user type a text note. This is useful for storing information that shouldn’t be in the book itself, such as planning notes for your book, or a list of corrections to be applied, or maybe to keep track of the sites to which the book has been submitted. Typically you’ll add these under the Scraps folder.
Folder document
The folder document allows you to group your documents as you wish. For example you might have a Web Links folder, and a My Photos folder. Note that while folder documents are particularly suited to containing further documents, in fact any document may contain children. Don’t create folder documents under your book Content folder – this may only contain book section documents.
Image document
Use these to store images that won’t appear in the book, perhaps for research purposes. You can create an image document from an image on the clipboard, with Edit | Paste New Scrap (Ctrl+Alt+V). Or you can create a new image document and then paste the image into it with Ctrl+V or Edit | Paste. You can also resize the image and use a different format from the default format (PNG) using the image properties. Note that Jutoh normally saves images in full color, so it is best to use the compressed JPEG format for large images. JPEG images are saved at 90% quality, but try not to load and save JPEG images repeatedly or the image will degrade.
Web link document
A web link document contains a web address (or URL), and an optional description. These won’t form part of the book.
Shortcut document
A shortcut document contains the location of a document or application on your computer. Again, these won’t form part of the book – they are for your reference only.
Font document
A font document contains a TTF or OTF font for embedding in an ebook. The font data is stored within the project file and copied to the book when compiling. Embedding fonts is beyond the scope of this document, but you can find details in the Jutoh manual. It is recommended that you don’t embed fonts and that you only use basic fonts such as Times New Roman, which is guaranteed to be supported on all ebook readers.
Media document
A media document contains an audio, video or image file for use in a media object. Embedding media objects is beyond the scope of this document (not least because few ebook platforms support embedded media). If you are determined to embed media (for example, if only targeting iBooks Epub books) you can find details in the Jutoh manual, and also a brief description in Chapter 15: Advanced Topics.
Summary
In this chapter you have learned how projects and documents work. It was probably filed in the ‘boring but important’ drawer in your brain. Next, we look at how you can get your existing work into Jutoh.
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(Pages 1-43 show above.)