Editing Epub Contents
When you have selected a book in your library, by clicking on its title or on the Edit button beneath the title, you will be taken to the Editor screen. It’s here that you perform your main task as an author – writing the content in the editing window. The following screenshot shows the Editor screen after selecting a book.
Editor screen
The title of the book is shown at the top. Beneath the title is the table of contents presented in a hierarchical view.
The content documents are presented in the order in which they appear in the book’s ’navigation map’ which is part of an epub’s packaging information; however, you can simply think of it as a table of contents.
Notice that the Title content document is selected, as indicated by the blue background, and the document is displayed in the editing window to the right.
When a new epub book is created, it has a title document and a copyright document. These documents incorporate the metadata you entered on the New Epub screen. The title document includes:
- The book title
- The author’s name
- The publication date
The copyright document includes:
- The author’s name
- The year of publication
To switch content documents, click on the title of the document you want to view in the editing window. The following screenshot shows the result of clicking on the Copyright document in the table of contents.
Copyright document
If you switch between these documents you will notice that the title document is centered while the copyright document is left-justified. This is achieved by the use of CSS stylesheets.
The new epub documents that opubWriter creates are set up with two stylesheets. You will see in another lesson how to edit these stylesheets, add new stylesheets to the book, and to control which stylesheets are applied to which content documents. In the example shown below a new document was added using the Organisation screen. Until the User Guide is updated, you can learn how to do this in the the opubWriter blog.
New content document
The new document is loaded into the editing window. I’ve added some text to show how the window looks as you develop the content.
Now, it’s time to look at the editing window in more detail. If you are familiar with blogging software like WordPress or Content Management packages like Joomla you may have seen this kind of editing window before.
It doesn’t provide word processing abilities that match the likes of Word or OpenOffice, but most writers don’t actually need that level of sophistication. In some ways, the simpler the structure of your text the more it is likely to be rendered in a usable way on a wide range of devices.
The options available in the top toolbar include: bold, italic, underscore, and strikethrough. These are followed by dropdown lists to allow you to select the text style (paragraph, heading1, heading2, etc.), the font-family, and the font-size.
In the second toolbar row, there are options for
- unordered and ordered lists
- indent and outdent
- undo and redo
- create and destroy hyperlinks
- add anchors
- insert images – the lesson about the Media screen will explain how to upload images and insert them in your content documents.
In the third toolbar, the following options are available:
- insert horizontal rule
- subscript and superscript
- insert special characters like ©.
Above the editing window is the Save button. To save your changes to the current content document, you click on this button, or press Alt+S (hold down the Alt key and press ‘s’). If you don’t do this your changes will be lost.
