I am writing a How To e-book (about photography) and need to bring in photos, graphs and charts. My document will be compiled as an e-book for Smashwords and Amazon publication.
How do I get images of the above type into my manuscript?
What steps are necessary to be sure they are formatted correctly?
I have found that:
When I copy and paste an image from my desktop into my manuscript it pastes okay. The Image is then center justified. I add a center justified caption in smaller font 8pt vs 12pt and in italics. When I compile the document the images are left justified as are the captions. The captions also are no longer italic nor an 8pt font but have reverted to the standard text font and 12pt.
What is the proper procedure for using images?
Also, I have read somewhere that the images should be PNG. Is this correct or can I use JPEG images?
I could be wrong… but Scrivener seems more focused and specialized on writing and basic book formatting than on complexly formatted and/or image intensive page layout. You might consider other/additional software that focuses more on the latter (Adobe inDesign, Scribus, …) when you are at the stage of doing the page layout.
Let me pass on some things I learned concerning photos; hopefully, this can save you some time. I wish I’d known these things before I started.
One problem you’ll have is the size of the MOBI file. My current book has 42 photos, and the MOBI file comes out to about 22 megs. It can be up to 50 Meg, but above 25, you lose the option to email the mobi file to your Kindle. I got it below 25 by reducing the photos to between 400 and 600 wide. For the most scenic photos, I set the width to 800 pixels.
I recommend saving all your photos in an uncompressed format, say TIF, and also creating compressed versions for inclusion in your project.
Use JPG for the photos, and PNG for charts and graphs.
Consider using As Is formatting for your project, because getting photos to be centered will require additional steps in Sigil or other editor. IOW, you can’t do centered paragraphs in Scrivener unless you use, As Is. As Is is also the solution to the problems you mentioned with italics and font size.
Forget about having captions below your images. It will not work in your ebook because sometimes the caption will be on the next page. You can’t control this unless you skip to a new page for each image.
I compile to ePub (not using As Is), then I use Sigil to center the photo paragraphs, set the width to full column, remove the height, and fix a bolding issue.