Generating a new E-Book

This is not an advertisement for Adobe Creative Cloud - it just happens to be the main toolset I've used. I'm sure other toolsets are available. 

The E-Book on my old iPad 2
©Harveywetdog

In an earlier blog we talked about how I’d generated an E-Book in 2012 which I’d managed to lose all trace of when the site I’d loaded it onto had deleted some old documents. The subject of the E-Book was a safari trip my wife and I took to Tanzania and Kenya.

You can listen to the podcast on YouTube.

Having completed the podcast I turned my attention to regenerating the E-Book. As I’d used Adobe Firefly for the speech to audio conversion, I decided to try out Adobe InDesign for the book. As with all on-line tools it took a bit of getting used to but it didn’t take long before I had a reasonable output on pdf. 

I’d decided that, having made the podcast public on YouTube, I wouldn’t publish the E-Book on line. This gave me a greater choice of the photographs I would be able to use as obviously some were quite personal. The original 1990 hand written journal had included photographs, but these were very much what was left after we’d filled our own album and shared our spares with our fellow travellers. And, for the avoidance of doubt, back in 1990 we’re talking about printed photographs created from 35mm negative strips and not electronic copies.

After a bit of getting used to InDesign, which involved, learning the difference between pages and spreads, understanding how to insert text, and place or relink photographs, I quickly had a completed document saved to pdf. The first version produced a pdf per page, so I had to change the settings so that the spreads came out as two pages per spread. This was particularly important for those spreads which featured a single image.

About this point I decided to recommission my old iPad2. I don't know what made me think of the iPad, I just think I had a nagging doubt that I must have saved a copy of the original E-Book somewhere. There was also a single chapter, the day in Ngorongoro, which I'd produced as a trial. I knew I'd seen a copy of this chapter in the last few years and the iPad was about the last place left that I hadn't looked for it.

Once the iPad had come back to life I looked through the pdfs in the library and was delighted to find the trial chapter, but when I broadened the search to All Books I found another reference to the Journal in an EPUB document. Was this the missing document?

The answer is yes and no. It was all the text, but the graphics had become disconnected. Using iMazing I was able to bring the two 2012 documents off the iPad onto my PC for safe keeping. After a bit of research I was able to produce the 2026 journal as an EPUB document and drop that back onto the iPad. Downloading as an EPUB document gives you access to the page turning features on the iPad, whereas the pdf is a flat document.

With the 2012 documents back on my PC I was able to take the original trial version and add that as an appendix to the 2026 version and examine the text in the original 2012 version. I used EPUB+ reader and converter on my PC to look at the EPUB documents.

Of course if I'd found the 2012 version a month ago it would have saved me a lot of typing but what else was I going to do in a very wet January. The whole exercise has given me the chance to go back over the Tanzania and Kenya photographs and re-edit them either as 16x9 or 7x5 images. The images I've used are a mixture of scans of photographs and scans of negatives. Whichever format I've used I've needed to clean them up with the Photoshop Spot Healing Brush and where possible I've used Generative Upscale to sharpen up the images. One warning with the Upscale tool; it can reintroduce apparent dots of dust onto the image so you may need to use the Spot Healing Brush again on the upscaled output.

One thing that really frustrates me is the availability of HDR tools on PC. With my iPhone I have Photoshop Express which has some great HDR pre-sets. I can't find the equivalent in the Creative Cloud toolset on PC which is quite frustrating.

I have another notebook for a trip to Malaysia and Singapore in 1991 so that might be my next project.

Final word on Adobe Creative Cloud; I use mainly Premiere Pro and the Photoshop photography suite, but this project has meant licenses for Firefly and InDesign as well. My website sits on MyPortfolio which is another Adobe product. Anyway, rather than having separate licenses for all these products I've opted to combine them all into a single Creative Cloud Pro license; I'll let you know how it goes. 

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Harveywetdog/Author - David Robinson CEng FIET 

David spent approaching 50 years in Her Majesty's Electricity Supply Industry before retiring

He was part of the highly successful design team on the Sizewell B Nuclear Power Station Project before spending 25 years producing safety cases to keep our aging AGR fleet generating for the good of the nation

He is responsible for the Harveywetdog YouTube Channel which he maintains as an outlet for his creative talents

David has twice experienced blood cancer treatment but absolutely refuses to be a victim

All views are of course his own but might be influenced by the medication he's having to take