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eScape Help Guide

Help, components & tutorials

Application Help

It starts just a little way down the page and helps you setup eScape, and use the various options.

Download the handy eScape Structure-Style Reference Guide Sheet to quickly learn the various Structure-Styles used to make an ePub with eScape.

Application Tutorial

Detailed online tutorial guide showing how to use Open Office to make great ePubs. Go to the tutorial. (opens in a new window in the IGP:FLIP Reader)

Download this annotated tutorial book It's an Open Office ODT ready for instant creation to ePub. It provides line-by-line instructions on how to style an Open Office Writer document for Consistent use. Better still, you can use it to instantly create your first ePub using eScape.

Application Components

Open Office Templates

Download the template: igp-eScape-book-template.ott. This one file is the heart and soul of the eScape ePub creation system. See this guide on installing the template into Open Office if you are unsure. There is currently one Open Office template available.

Stylesheets

There are two stylesheets included in the installation. For more information on using stylesheets with IGP:FoundationXHTML, and as a starting point to creating your own, download this annotated eScape CSS and save it to your CSS production location. All annotations are automatically stripped by eScape, so don't worry about bloating your ePub.

Application Help

Using eScape is a one time simple installation and path configuration process, and you can then be producing ePubs easily. The real effort is styling your ODT files with the Structure Styling tags to get the layout look and feel you want.

Setting Up 1: Prerequisites

  1. This version runs on Windows XP/Vista, 32 and 64bit systems.
  2. You must have Open Office installed. Get it from here. The template and application has been tested on Open Office Version 2.3.1 to Version 3.0.1.
  3. You must have eScape installed and all path options set.
  4. Consider using eScape with AZARDI as your production environment.

Setting Up 2: Installing the Open Office Template File (OTT)

You can start a new document just by opening the template in Open Office. The template will install and you are ready to start editing. This is probably the best way to use the template file. However if you are a tidy person and like things in the right place, you can install the template.

  1. Download the template (OTT).
  2. Open the file in Open Office and click: File-Templates-Save... (Alt-F-T-T-S). If you are familiar with templates, do your own thing from here.
  3. If you are new to templates, give the template a recognizable name,
  4. Select a Category (My Templates is probably suitable), and click OK.
  5. To start production on a new eScape book, Click: File-New-Templates and Documents (Alt- F-N-N).
  6. This will open the Templates and Documents Dialog.
  7. Select the eScape template you have just saved.
  8. Click Open (Alt-O). The application will open a Writer document with all the styles ready for eScape Structure-Style formatting.

Setting Up 3: Configuring your Paths

eScape requires a few working directory locations to be preconfigured.

You will need to decide where on your computer you would like to carry out your ePub creation. We use a directory C:\eScape\ as the activity root directory, but you can call it anything you want.

Click on Configure then Setup eScape (Alt-S).You will see the following file path options:

1. Input XHTML files. These are where you put the XHTML files you generate from your Open Office ODT files using the Export-XHTML option. eScape will look into this directory for the input XHTML.

2. CSS Location. Set the CSS location if you have custom stylesheets you want to use. Until you have custom stylesheets, do not set a location.

4. ePub Location: This is where your output ePubs are going to be saved. If you make this the same directory as your AZARDI library folder, you will be able to work very easily and quickly between the producer and reader environments.

[C: or D:]\eScape\inputs
                  \css
                  \covers
                  \epub   
Or if you are using Azardi the epub path should be set to:
C:\azardi\library\              

Setting Up 4: About the Stylesheets

There are two default CSS files installed with the application - default and classic. It is useful to copy these stylesheets to your own production location you set the eScape CSS path and folder. This will make it easier to modify, create and use your own Stylesheets. To start, copy the CSS files from the application location to a directory of your choosing. You can find them at this path:

C:\Program Files\infogridpacific\igp_escape\fxcss

or

C:\Program Files (x86)\infogridpacific\igp_escape\fxcss (64bit Windows)

Copy them to your choosen CSS location and then set the eScape CSS path to that location.

Getting to work 1: Creating an ePub

Making an ePub with eScape is a two step process. 

  1. Open Office styling process and saving the file as XHTML
  2. Final package creation using the XHTML file as the input for the eScape application

Getting to work 2A: Open Office Styling

This Help file does not cover Structure-Styling in detail. Please refer to the Online Tutorial or this tutorial ODT. In brief the Structure-Stying sequence is:

  1. Open a new ODT using the supplied OTT.
  2. Paste your book text into the template after the metadata section.
  3. Make sure your text is all in the ODT Default style.
  4. Apply section, title, header, block, line, para and character styles in accordance with the Structure-Styling rules using only the provided custom style statements. (These all end with -igp)
  5. Save the Open Office ODT file
  6. Use File-Export (Alt-F-T-Enter). Browse to your eScape Input directory,
  7. From the file type selector, choose XHTML, rename the file if you want
  8. Export as XHTML to the eScape Input location
  9. Congratulations, you now have the input file eScape will use to create your instant ePub.

Getting to work 2B: Metadata

The ePub specification says you have to have a Title, Identifier and language statement. The OTT template makes sure you are aware of all of these and have a good chance to get them right.

These and other settings are in the first block of your OTT template with a bold red section bar. Fill them in correctly, fill in all the fields marked mandatory, and don't worry about the rest unless you want to. Don't delete any of them. The blue guide text around them will be stripped out by the processor.

eScape will check your Unique-Identifier to make sure it is a valid XML ID. That means it must: 1) start with an alpha character or underscore, 2) have no spaces, 3)contain only A-Z, a-z, 0-9, hypen and underscore characters. If you get this wrong eScape will give a warning message.

The filename of your ePub is set in the metadata - it is NOT the same as your XHTML file. This lets you have different version control information on XHTML files, while creating a clean ePub.

Getting to work 3: eScape Processing

eScape requires two mandatory components - the input XHTML and a CSS; and one optional component - the cover. This section assumes eScape is open and filepaths are configured as you like 'em!

  1. Browse to the Input XHTML file.Select the file you want to process. It must be a valid
  2. Select CSS. Use the selector to choose the stylesheet you want to apply to this book.
  3. Browse Cover. If you have a cover, navigate to and select the file.
  4. Generate Cover. If you don't have a cover you can use tthis option. This will reproduce your title page with a nicely coloured background - you can learn how to customize this later.
  5. Generate Contents. Select this if you want a table of content generated from your various titles (all the ODT paras where you applied the Heading 1 style). Important: If you did not put an empty Contents Page into your book (see the Structure Styling tutorial), eScape will insert it after the Title page, or if you have a copyright page, after that.
  6. Auto Numbering. eScape provides simple tools to allow the automated generation of numbers in the sections, inserted Table of Contents and ePub navigation Table of Contents. It also has a strategy to make sure that section labels can be processed in any language. Auto numbering works in conjuction with your Structure-Styling. See the next section for more details. 
  7.  Reverse Link Section titles to Content. If you have inserted a generated Content page, you can get eScape to automatically link the Chapter titles and numbers back to the Content Page. This can be useful in a book where you have to change chapters frequently, or just as a nice courtesy touch. 
  8. eScape to ePub. When you are ready click this button and your ePub will be instantly generated and saved into your ePub location.

Getting to work 4: File saving strategy

Like it or hate it, when you generate an ePub, eScape over-writes any ePub with the same name in your output location. This is to keep the production process fast and clean, and because usually you will generate the file a number of times as you make small corrections. 

If you have an ePub open in Adobe Digital Editions in file association mode (IE: you double-clicked the filename to open the ePub), and do a save operation to the same filename it will NOT over-write and will silently fail. Make sure all copies open in ADE are closed before saving.

This is not a problem in AZARDI due to the way it uses the files. If the file is open in AZARDI the ePub will save and can immediately be reopened.

Getting to work 5: Section numbering strategies.

You really need to get your head around the section numbering options. They are a bit abstract as they work between the Structure-Styles you have applied in Open Office, and the options in eScape. Go though the numbering tutorial for a quick understanding of what you can and cannot do with section numbering.This will probably sound a little garbled until you try it. It's really all quite easy.

Auto numbering generation, and how the output looks, responds to what you did with your Structure-Styling. That means you defined what section numbers look like by the way you style your section title blocks.

  1. There are three separate section counter sequences; one each for Parts, Chapters and Appendices. All use the same numbering style for any given book.
  2. There are two automatic numbering styles: Decimals (1, 2, 3, etc.) and Roman Capitals (I, II, III, etc.).
  3. Generated numbers appear on the ePub page section title block, in the ePub TOC, and in the generated Contents page if you use it.
  4. If you don't insert a title-num-igp style, and don't select auto numbering, no number will be generated.
  5. If you don't insert a title-num-igp style, and select auto numbering, a number will be inserted after the section break structure style.
  6. If you insert a section label (eg. Chapter), and style it as [ title-num-label-igp ] and select auto numbering, the number will be inserted after the label. This allows you to insert section labels in any language. 
  7. If you type a number into the [ title-num-label-igp ](Eg: Volume Thirty). Do not use autonumbering, and the label will be used in the presentation Tables of Content.

Getting to work 6: Covers

ePub supports PNG, JPG and GIF. You can make your covers any size you like, but choose something reasonable depending on your target device, and compress them nicely to reduce filesize.

For various reasons we strongly recommend JPG and PNG (PNG being the favourite because of standards compliance), but do realize a lot of people use GIF for legacy reasons, so we don't cry too much about it.

Resolution can be internet resolution of 96dpi, or 72dpi, but e-book readers are resolution independent so pixels is what is important. A practical maximum is 1200 pixels on the long side. We work with much smaller sizes such as 300px, 500px and 800px. The choice is yours. The good thing with eScape is, if you don't like your cover size, you can change it and instantly regenerate the new ePub.

Getting to work 7: Validate your book.

The jobs not finished until the Quality Control is applied. eScape uses a number of pre-defined processes to ensure your book comes out as a valid ePub - it does NOT internally validate its processing in this version.

However, we don't know how good you are at following instructions - nor how coherent the instructions actually are from your perspective! Open Office is a big application with a zillion murky styles you can apply to give eScape hiccups. Stick to the script and you will be OK, get creative with styling and you will possibly get strange effects or eScape will reject you outright.

All our testing is done following the scripts. We haven't yet tried to make it fail by applying random styles and settings all over the place (what's the point). If you have problems and want to tell us about them, use the XML blog, or email us with your issues.

To make sure your ePub is the real thing validate them at the free ePub validator kindly provided by Threepress Consulting Inc.. This gives you an independent quality check. You can find it here (opens in a new window).

Reading your book

All of this was so you had a ePub e-book ready to read on your workstation, mobile device or e-book device.

You can share your brilliant new ePub with friends and family, even make everyone personalized editions - just because it is so easy. It will be able to be read on all standards compliant ePub readers.