--Preface-- Well I have been requested to create tutorial on creating Newton books, and I decided to go a few steps further and give you the low-down on the various ways to create a Newton Book, what the advantages and disadvantages of the various methods. Tips and tricks I have learned with the different creation programs. And probably most requested...how to create multi-format Newton Books! I call this: --------Newton Bookmaking 101-------- Now first off this will only deal with Newton Books and not PaperBack books. I realize that technically PaperBack is a book on a Newton but that is a very simple program and really there are not any helpful tips or suggestions for use with it. And I assume you have Press, Bookmaker, and the Newton Tool Kit installed (available at http://www.unna.org). --Making Your Text Book Ready-- Before you create a Newton Book with either program you need to make sure your source is ready. Many ebooks (or etexts as they are sometimes called) have errors in them or hard line feeds that do not render well on the Newtons small screen without some clean up first. For this I use a program called Interparse (included with Newton Bookmaking 101). It is simple yet powerful and allows you to go back to any point if you find the reparsing is not going as you planned. Often the first thing to do is convert the hard single line feed into CRLF. Then remove hyphenated line end. And finally remove all CRLF"S (except at paragraph end). This will fix almost all of the Project Gutenberg etext and most of what you will find around the net and takes about 1 minute. Much faster and simpler than any other method I have seen mentioned.. Some might need more parsing which will require testing different techniques to get the text "fixed". But it really goes quite quickly as you can see exactly what are you are doing and can undo (backout) at any time. --Press or Bookmaker Your Choice-- The two programs for creating Newton Books are Press and Bookmaker. Both have there strengths and weaknesses. Press is simple use with its graphic interface, easy to change formats, and to embed graphics into the book. Also what you see is what you get, so there is not any guesswork involved....you know exactly how your book will look on the Newton. And can easily switch screen sizes to create another book without redoing the entire book again. The disadvantage of Press is that it usually takes some time to create a table of contents or links. The reason is you must manually search though a document page by page (there is no find or search features in Press) and create the links or table of contents entries one by one. A trick I have used is either to copy and paste each section from the master document to press and add each link or table of contents point then. Or you can create separate documents (one for each chapter for example) and each time you add them to Press a table of contents entry is created with the name of the file as the name of the entry (providing the preference setting in Press is turned on). But still this takes time. And there is a problem if you create book via press and modify it, or type a document directly into Press, there is not a easy way of exporting it out to a plain text file again. This forces you to make changes in both the master document AND the Press file. Or recreating the Press file from scratch (rebuilding the table of contents, readding graphics etc.) if you wish to keep both the master document and the Press file data the same. Bookmaker on the other hand is very different. While you do start with a master plain text document (the same as with Press) but that is were the similarities end. Instead of importing the document into Bookmaker, you take that master document and add text commands to it. These are often called DOT COMMANDS because they are always at the beginning of a line and always start with a dot. These commands can do some pretty amazing things with graphics and you can even use Newton script to animate books or have other special features. Next, you process this master document through the bookmaker program, then you take the newly created Bookmaker script file, and process it through Newton Toolkit. This is done by Creating a new project, adding the script file to it, setting the package type to book (in project settings), turn on compression, turn off all other check marks having to do with debugging (also in project settings), and give the project a unique name. Then you just hit build package (in the project menu) to create a package that you can install on your Newton. As for the dot commands you only need to learn the following: .title Putthetitleofyourbookhere .shorttitle shorttitleof the book as it will appear in the extras drawer .isbn 8475957 .layout default 12 NoTitle .subject 1 browseronly Name of the Book that will appear as the first item in the table of contents .story The above commands are all you need to create a book with a table of contents. You can get much more elaborate, but for a nice book without any graphics these commands will serve you well. If all you did was take this short section of commands and put it at the top of your master text document, you can make a working book. I added a few flags like "notitle" after the ".layout default 12" so that the book does not display its title at the top of every page. You can remove that if you want. And the flag "browseronly" after ".subject 1" means that the next line will only appear in the table of contents but not in the book itself. If you leave off "browseronly" then the next line will appear in the book itself as well as in the table of contents. To add more items to the table of contents just add ".subject 1" to a line all by itself and then the next line is what you want to appear in the table of contents. If you use the search/find option of your word processor you can easily find chapters and add them to the table of contents. Personally I like Bookmaker much more than Press, once I got the hang of it. The reason being, you can make quick changes and in the end you still have a master plain text file that is up to date. But to do the same with press you need to recreate your Press document or make the changes in your master as well as in Press and it is easy to get the two documents "out of sync". And you can quickly create a table of contents with Bookmaker, by using your favorite word processor's find/search ablities to locate chapters (which Press is sorely lacking). --Chosing Different Typefaces-- Now some people might be asking about different typefaces. Well it is very easy to change them in Press, and again what you see is what you get (just select text and change the font). In Bookmaker though it is a bit different. First, copy the font file (.fon) from the press directory to your main font system directory so that other programs can use it (in windows this is under windows/fonts, I am not fluent in the Mac or Linux so you will have to ask others for the locations on those platforms). After you have added all your dot commands and are ready to process the file though Bookmaker, save your file then select your whole document and with the right font size selected first, now select the Newton font you installed. Then select save as and save the document as RTF (Rich Text Format) format. And close your word processor and if you are asked "would you like to update/save" say no as you have already saved it as RTF. Now the reason why this was the very last step with the master text file is because some word processors are not 100% Bookmaker RTF compatible. And if you hit enter (carriage return) or other characters it does not understand then save and try to process that RTF file though Bookmaker you may get errors even though the commands themselves are correct. In fact I suggest checking your commands and Toolkit package creating method with a plain text document first so you are certain that everything is working properly before trying a RTF document. Another method is to change everything to serif fonts if you want New York, or sana serif if you want Geneva. Then save as RTF. And of course if you just process a plain text file, then everything will come out as Espy font on your Newton (but beware, most readers HATE this font). I personally use New York at 12pt as that is much more reader friendly than the default Espy. And while you can do different fonts in the same document by the above method (and saving as RTF), make sure you don't do any other editing, as you might get errors when processing the RTF file through bookmaker. --Multi-Format Newton Books-- I bet some of you are wondering what are Multi-Format Newton Books? Well Multi-Format books are books that will display on different screen sizes and use the entire screen. While Press can make a "Universal" format it is just smaller size so that it can fit on all Newton screens, it does not actually change sizes for different screens. While Multi-Format can. To change sizes you simply select the "i" then preferences while reading a Newton Book. And recently I discovered how to create these multi-format Newton Books, which had always been assumed possible but never proven (since Apple left out a setting for differnt screen sizes in the Newton Bookreader).. Multi-Format does add some space to the final package (about 100k per additional format), but it is still a lot smaller than having several copies of the same book. You can only create Multi-Format books with Bookmaker, but perhaps someone more talented than I can figure out how to hack Press so it can as well. It is very simple to create a Multi-format book. First you create a bookmaker processed file as you would normally, but you alter this output file (which is plain text file with a .f extension) before you send it to the Newton Toolkit. You open the file in a word processor and look for the line // Pages pageList := {pageSize: {left: 0, top: 0, right: 240, bottom: 318}, contents: [], pages: []}; and then you copy from that line to the end of the document so that all the //pages1 //pages2 //pages3 etc, commands are included and you paste a copy to the end of the document. One copy for each extra format. Now you just alter the size to the screen size you want (you only need to change the 240 and 318), save the file, create a project in Toolkit (with a unique package name, compression on, all debugging settings off), add the bookmaker processed file to the project, build a package, and install on your Newton are set. The various screen sizes are as follows: Classic-right: 240, bottom: 302 MP2000-Portrate-right: 298, bottom: 388 MP2000-Landscape-right: 414, bottom: 276 Emate-Portrate-right: 302, bottom: 436 Emate-Landscape-right: 464, bottom: 282 And perhaps you might have noticed there are two methods of having a control panel in a Newton Book. One that is basically the close X and and button that opens the rest of it. And one that is always open at the bottom of the screen. Well Bookmaker creates by default the "slide open" type control panel in classic screen size. Which I suppose it is not that big of a deal normally. But if you use XNewtBook, then it becomes more important as that program will not function with Newton Books that have the slide open control panel. You can create a "always open" type control panel (like the one Press creates) by making the bottom 302 in the pagelist (for Classic format anyway). This will give it the same dimensions as ones created by Press and it will always have the control panel at the bottom of the screen. --ISBN Numbers-- One thing I should elaborate on is the ISBN number MUST be different for each book. The reason is this is how the Newton keeps track of the different books in the library soup. And if you can't have more than one book with the same ISBN number, if you try it will almost finish downloading then abort saying that "package is already installed". The ISBN does not have to be all numbers, it can contain letters as well, which helps give it more variety. and decrease the chance that two books will have the same ISBN. Press seems to generate a random ISBN from my experience each time a new press file is created (which is changeable if you wish). Bookmaker you need to come up with one, and if you copy the commands from one book to another make sure you change the title and ISBN numbers at least so the book will be 100% unique and no chance of confusion (and changing the project name in Toolkit is a good idea as well). --Graphics-- Graphics are handled differently in each program. Press will automatically convert a bmp or PICT file to something that the Newton can use. The effect is not the best though. But it is fast and works well if you just want to get a simple graphic into the Newton. It will even convert a color image into black and white or 16 shades of gray depending on the Newton screen format you are using at the time the graphic was added. To get the best image possible you really want to size the image for the screen you are creating the book for. Then modify it to 16 shades of gray (gray scale mode) or black and white (often called Bitmap mode), depending on the Newton, with a program like Photoshop or some other high quality image editing software. Then when you add it to Press, it will give you a much better result than just allowing it to do the conversion. Bookmaker is quite a bit different in that the best way is not to "add" the image to the text document but rather link it via a dot command. While you can add the image and save via RTF format, but with the varying RTF formats, the best way is to link it. And with this method you *must* convert the image to a "newton ready" format as Bookmaker does not do any conversion at all. .picture c\mydocuments\mypic.bmp Is the command and If you use a Mac, then it would be mypic.PICT --Summary-- So in short Press is great to start with. Or if you want to make a really quick book without any table of contents, and if you want to have "what you see is what you get". But if you want to have easier to maintain document, better graphics capability, the ablity to use newtonscript, multi-format books, and fast creation of table of contents then Bookmaker is a better choice. Once you have created a few books with Bookmaker, it is easy to create a nice book with full table of contents in 15 minutes or less. And it is certainly worth it. I hope that this tutorial has cleared up any questions you might have had about Bookmaking. However if you have any more, feel free to ask on the Newtontalk list and I or someone more knowledgeable than myself will gladly help you out. --Where to Get Books-- Well there are many places to get Newton Books (unna.org is a good start) or you can get other formats that you can convert to Newton Book. Palmdoc format is probably the easiest, popular format to convert. There are several nice programs that will do the conversion, and Newtscape can even read this format. But it is still best to convert it as you will then get all the advantages of the Newton Bookreader (bookmarks, annotations, table of contents, etc). Some of the best places to get ebooks are: United Network of Newton Archives (http://www.unna.org) This is a great resrouce for everything Newton such as copies of Bookmaker and Press. Not to mention lots of free ready to install Newton Books! Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.net/) Memoware (http://www.memoware.com/) Free Ebook Libary of University of Virginia (http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/) Alex Catalouge (http://www.informations.com/alex) Or if you want to purchase books Bean.com (http://www.baen.com/) Fictionwise.com Alexlit.com The ones listed above I have actually used or know someone that has used them to create Newton books. But there are many more. You want to look for plain text or PalmDoc format. All of the sources mentioned above offer plain text or PalmDoc format. Some like Bean.com and Alexlit.com also offer RTF, HTML, RocketBook, among others. What you want to avoid is encrypted formats as they are difficult if not impossible to convert to plain text which Press or Bookmaker requires. And some formats, even if not encrypted, may not have a method of converting to plain text. The Microsoft Reader or Adobe Acrobat format are good example of this. So make sure you ask before you buy a book if you are not sure. ---The files that are included with this tutorial--- bookmaking tutorial.txt -this file Interparse.exe -a simple but powerful text parser the best I have found super simple story.txt -the book text file with DOT COMMANDS added super simple story.rtf -the same as above but with the font changed to New York and saved to RTF format super simple story.f -after processing through the Bookmaker program. I also added several sizes (classic, MP2000 portrate, MP2000 Landscape) making it a Mutli-format book. super simple story.NTK -this is the Newton ToolKit Project file with the Bookmaker script file added and all project settings properly set. super simple story.pkg -the actual package created after clicking on "build" in the project menu of the Newton ToolKit. This is the file you install on your Newton. Written by dan@dbdigitaleweb.com all rights reserved. You may freely distribute this tutorial, but it may not be sold and all files must be kept together. If you have any questions or problems regarding this document please feel free to ask.