Hi,
Anyone have any good ideas/methods/best practise for converting my Scrivener ms to epub format? I’d like to read my novel as an ebook on my iPad. I’d also like to incorporate the graphics of my front cover as well.
Best Regards
Steve
The best and easiest way is to wait for 2.0, which has a direct .epub exporter, of course. 
Best,
Keith
If you can’t wait for 2, Calibre http://calibre-ebook.com/download_osx seems straightforward to use, especially if there are no problems with the formatting. Best? I don’t know … it’s the only one I know.
Sigil http://code.google.com/p/sigil/downloads/detail?name=Sigil-0.2.0b-Mac-Package.dmg&can=2&q= allows you to edit the ePub format directly. I only have an early version – this has prompted me to check for updates – and found it a bit buggy so haven’t really used it. It doesn’t have an upload mechanism.
Mark
The free Stanza Desktop beta has worked for me the few times I converted .doc files to .epub, and it’s not Stanza-specific so you could use the .epub file wherever you wanted. (It’s also easy to get them onto Stanza on the iPod/iPhone, but I don’t know if there’s an iPad version or whether that’s what you’re using.)
Hmm … I forgot about Stanza as I only use it for reading, whether on the computer or my iTouch … didn’t think about it for converting or uploading. I reckon it’s really good as a reader.
Mark
I haven’t compared Stanza to others, but I’ve been quite happy with it on the iPod so far. I actually got it specifically for reading manuscripts, because I was sick to death of trying to switch things to Google Docs or use Drop Box and then have to scroll through hundreds of pages. Invariably I’d somehow hit the magic button to lose my place and get yanked all the way back to the beginning. That got old fast, hence my seeking out the .epub/Stanza route. It’s also been nice since it allows all the flexibility of switching the background and text colors, etc. and annotations, though I haven’t actually used that feature so I don’t know if it’s possible to convert back to use on the Mac.
Thanks Keith, I’m hanging out for that, as we all are.
Thanks for all the other suggestions from everyone.
I’ll try Calibre and see what happens.
Once again, thanks heaps everyone.
Steve.
It worked! Mostly.
Hey, I tried Calibre. It worked quite well. I didn’t bother to set up a front cover and some of the early contents pages were not formatted correctly (mostly due to my haste to get a rough idea if it worked at all) but the whole novel, all 650 epub pages of it came in perfectly, including the chapter headings, layout, etc.
Pasted it into iTunes and then sync’d with the iPad and, voila! There it was on my iPad bookshelf. Looked very cool too. Like a bought one.
Hope Keith’s epub version is a little easier to use (more intuitive) and integrated well into Scrivener with an output viewer so you can ascertain that the conversion and formatting have worked as you would expect for the desired ereader (in my case the iPad).
Thanks to all for the help. Much appreciated.
Steve
It should be easy enough to set up, but there’ll be no output viewer - for that I’d have to write my own e-book reader and each e-book reader has different limitations so it wouldn’t be accurate for all anyway. The only way to test will be trial and error.
Best,
Keith