How to fix margins on an ePub for Nook?

December 16, 2010 8:36 PM

Help with creating an ePub file for my Nook ereader. This may be a no-brainer for you HTML experts--I want to specify margins to ensure they fit the Nook's screen...

I'm attempting to convert a certain website from HTML to ePub format for my Nook, but going through Calibre (the standard converter for ebooks and ereaders) doesn't do a very good job of it. So I found another bit of software named Jotoh that seems to be much more workmanlike; I can go in a fiddle around with the HTML directly. Which isn't entirely helpful because I'm pretty n00bish with that. But anyway.

The Nook's screen is 800 (vertical) by 600 (horizontal). I want to lock that 600 pixel width into the code...how do I do that?

Another tricky thing with the site's HTML (and the resultant epubs) is that there are boxes on the right-hand margin, which have text in them--annotations. What I fear is that if the margins change, the boxes will be spread out all willy nilly. But I want to keep those boxes, but keep everything within a 600 pixel width. The height doesn't really matter--I can just turn the page for that, but scrolling over isn't an option.

Any ideas? Does this even make any sense?

posted by zardoz to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (1 answer total)

Best answer: You don't have much control with fixed width formatting in eBooks. You pretty much have to let the reader flow the text and adjust margins. You might have some trouble as there is no set way to define annotations with the ePub format. You could put them at the end of your document and link them like footnotes.
posted by wongcorgi at 1:15 PM on December 17, 2010