This forum has really been helpful in guiding me through rough places as I finish the last few little tweaks of getting my first Scrivener built book out. I want to thank all of you ahead of time. It certainly makes it a lot easier!!!
Anyway, today’s question.
I’d like to add an image to a specific page. I’ve done it successfully, both by dragging and dropping the image from the binder and by using image tags.
When I inserted the image, (a bookplate image for my title page of the novel–takes up most of a normal page) it worked great as a mobi file when I reviewed it in my Kindle previewer and on my kindle for Mac and Android devices.
But not so much as an epub. In calibre, the page itself looks great–perfect. BUT it looks as if it added two ghost pages. (empty pages following it where the page number at the top of the reader window never changes) As a note, it does the same thing as a mobi file, so it’s obviously a calibre thing.
In Adobe Editions, the image is HUGE!!! Just as it looked when I dragged it to the page in Scrivener editor. There are no ghost pages, but you can’t see the whole page at all.
I can make the image smaller and then, yes, it can be seen, but then it’s too small for what I want.
So, is there a way to tell Scrivener to adjust the size depending on the format? Or will I just need to build a separate page for each of the formats I’m looking at. Or is there something else entirely that I’m missing???
Different readers are going to display images differently, there is really no magic solution that would solve all display issues with all images across all of the dozens of common of book reader platforms out there. You can, with a bit if experimentation, probably figure out a happy medium that works “well enough” on most of the common platforms. You may even find some help pages on the Web that describe best practices. If you’re at all picky about making things look the best they can though, optimising your material to the platform is the best way to go.
You may find this isn’t as difficult to manage as you think. Image placeholder tags were introduce in large part to make procedural image handling a possibility. Consider that they are of course just plain old text typed into the editor, and thus they are susceptible to what the Replacements pane can do, when you compile. Thus you can do something like this:
<$img:PLATFORM-imagename>
Then in your preset replacements tab, search for all-caps “PLATFORM” and replace with “epub-imagename”. Now if you have an image that needs special treatment on the epub platform, you can just create a version for it in your Binder, call it “epub-imagename” and refer to it using this text.
Since replacements can be saved as part of a preset, that means you can easily save these text conversions as a part of the rest of your platform specific settings. Switch to “Kindle” and it will load a different preset that looks for files named “kindle-imagename”, etc.
Replacements are pretty simple in concept: think of them as plain old text search and replace, except one that is only run as you compile, on the text that is saved, so thus not changing the original text.
So with that principle in mind, the word “platform” that I chose there is just arbitrary. You could use “butterbeans” and it would work just as well. The thing is to pick some text that won’t happen otherwise (like all-caps “PLATFORM”) and use that for what you are searching for, replacing the text with something useful, like <$img:kindle-imagename>. So you just need an image with that name, somewhere in the Binder, to get it linked up and exported. When your replacement converts the word ‘PLATFORM’ to ‘epub’, then it picks the filename starting with “epub” instead.
If you are asking more generally what I mean by platform, I’m referring to the different brands of readers and the rendering engines they use to display e-books.
The thing is to pick some text that won’t happen otherwise (like all-caps “PLATFORM”) and use that for what you are searching for, replacing the text with something useful, like