Teach you how to use Caliber to create e-books on Linux

Since Amazon started selling e-books many years ago, e-books have grown by leaps and bounds and become more and more popular. The good news is that e-books are very easy to create using free and open source tools, and this beginner's guide tells you how to quickly create an e-book on Linux using the Caliber tool.

Create an e-book on Linux

To create an e-book, you'll probably need two pieces of software: a text processor (of course, I use LibreOffice) and Caliber. Caliber is an excellent e-book reader and e-book library program. You can use it to open ePub files or manage your collection of e-books on Linux. (LCTT translation annotation: LibreOffice is software used to process text on Linux, similar to Office software in Windows)

In addition to these software, you also need to prepare an e-book cover (1410×2250) and your original manuscript.
first step
First, you need to open your manuscript in your text processor program. Caliber can automatically create a book catalog for you. To use this feature, you need to set the heading style of each chapter in your manuscript to "Heading 1". To do this in LibreOffice, just highlight the heading and select "Heading 1" in the paragraph style drop-down box. That’s it.

If you want to have sub-chapters and want them to be added to the table of contents, just set the titles of these sub-chapters to Heading 2. After doing this, save your document as an HTML format file.
Second step
Within the Caliber program, click the "Add Book" button. After the dialog box appears, you can open the HTML format file you just saved and add it to Caliber.

third step
Once the HTML file is added to the Caliber library, select the new file and click the "Edit Metadata" button. Here, you can add the following information: title, author, cover image, description, and other information. When you're done filling it out, click "Ok."

the fourth step
Now click on the "Convert Books" button. In the new window, there will be some options here, but you won't need to use them.

In the selection box at the upper right of the new window, select the epub file format. Caliber also has other options for creating mobi file formats, but I find that things often happen after creating those files that I didn't expect.

the fifth step
In the new dialog box on the left, click "Appearance". Then check "Remove white space between paragraphs".

Next, we will create a content directory. If you don't plan to use a table of contents in your book, you can skip this step. Select the Content Directory tab. Next, click the magic wand icon to the right of "First-level Directory".

In this new window, select "h1" from the drop-down menu under "Match HTML tags." Click "OK" to close this window. If you have subsections, select "h2" under "Second level directory".

Before we start generating the e-book, choose to export the EPUB file. On this new page, select the "Insert Table of Contents" option.

Now all you need to do is click "OK" to start generating the e-book. Unless yours is a large file, the process of generating an e-book is usually completed quickly. At this point, you have created an e-book.

For some special users, such as those who know how to write CSS style files (LCTT translation annotation: CSS files can be used to beautify HTML pages), Caliber gives such users an option to add CSS styles to articles. Just go back to the Appearance section and select the Style tab option. But if you want to create a mobi format file, for some reasons, it cannot accept CSS style files.

Okay, does it feel very easy? I hope this tutorial helped you create ebooks on Linux.

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