LibreOffice Writer Help (and general advice welcomed)

[Fanboi]

Hi all,

Need some assistance with LO Writer. I'm trying to do some fixes on my novel. I have a few questions.
(Please do not suggest using auto-correcting the whole thing as it breaks everything. Any alternatives / thinking out the box for my issues is welcome.)

Specs:
LO: Version: 7.4.7.2 / LibreOffice Community
Locale: en-ZA (en_ZA.UTF-8); UI: en-US (en_ZA = en_UK)
Related packages: aspell, dictionaries-common, echant-2, hunspell, ispell

Issues:

Replacing ' ' with ‘ ’ (ie: dumb quotes with smart quotes): Any way to bulk action this. Search and replace won't help because I can only replace one char at a time and REGEX doesn't seem to work in searches. Unless LO has some automagic where replacing all ' with ‘ will automatically change ‘ to ’ at the end of words? If anyone knows a REGEX that would work, that'd be great. ChatGPT is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.

Get rid of trailing spaces: Much the same issue as the above. REGEX for \n doesn't seem to work but I'm open to suggests. If there's a tool in LO Writer that can do this, that'd be great, too. Bonus points: I think I've eliminated preceding spaces, but not 100% so that'd be a "nice to have".

Remove page-specific formatting: I don't want to lose other formatting like italics, etc. I just want to strip it of everything else. Page breaks can be backspaced, but it's a manual thing and I can't find a search option for this. Ultimately I need to remove everything as it needs to be ready for eBook conversion. I know I have to set headings (h1, h2...) but it needs to be clean to do all that.

TOC: When I'm ready, I need to generate a TOC apparently. Not sure where to got here. ChatGPT's instructions weren't the best. That said, the other questions are more important.

Spelling/grammar checks: Spell-checker seems to work, but nothing on the grammar side of things. I doubt my grammar across some 300 A4 pages is perfect -- anyone who's seen enough of my posts will notice that I often type way too fast and don't revise before posting, lol.
I cannot find the standalone grammar-checker either. See the last I seriously used LO it was like 4.x or 5.x, many moons ago and the UI has grown. I write in a plain text editor most of the time anyway, then paste into LO Writer. Bad practice, but I'm old school. Find word processors distracting.

What tools do I have on Linux to create ebooks for KDP: LO has an ePUB export option, but I'm looking for something very specific. Last try I had, I seem to remember KDP having an emulator for Kindle readers to preview work and a conversion tool. I cannot find them. Alternatives welcome if they're error-free. I'm not sure that LO's built-in exporter has all the finer controls needed for KDP.

Bonus points:

If anyone has published on KDP, your advice would be invaluable. Years ago I looked into it but, there was a lot of "fannying about" (TV ref) involved and at the end red-tape blocking me. Years passed and I looked into it again. The process at least supported my country and circumstances, but "Life" happened. Needless to say, what little I remember is gone, is outdated (I hear they prefer ePub to mobi now). So anecdotal advice is appreciated so far as spec goes as I would like to avoid months of pouring through documentation for a third time.

If anyone has published fiction anywhere "official", physical or eBook, on any platform, general tips are welcome.

Thanks so much in advance!

 

[osprey]

If anyone has published fiction anywhere "official", physical or eBook, on any platform, general tips are welcome.

Thanks so much in advance!

Congratulations for taking on such a non-trivial undertaking. I'm not sure what I have to say here is going to be helpful to you, but since you asked for "general tips" on "any platform", here goes

With some experience of authoring a few tomes of novel length here, though not novels themselves, but now having them lodged in some academic libraries, the idea of using a word processor as opposed to a typesetter was never a consideration in my case because of formatting issues, some of which you've alluded to.

With a typesetter, the full range of linux's text manipulating tools become available in addition to the macros in the typesetter itself.

The two main typesetters I considered were tex and troff, and I chose to use troff, (which transformed into groff), because I had the book "UNIX Text Processing" (by Dougherty & O'Reilly) before I acquired "The Texbook" (by Knuth). Latex was the other main text typesetting program that was on the horizon.

The advice I received early on in the writing projects was to just write the text in a text editor without any formatting other than ordinary punctuation. Once it was complete in text form, the typesetter and text manipulating tools could format it. It meant there were two separate processes, the writing, and then the formatting. It's still the way I write today. I guess one can do that with a word processor, but I found it's more common to format the text as one is progressing through the writing with the word processor. The issue for me was that the word processor didn't have the flexibility or the benefit of the sophisticated text manipulating linux tools which were optimal for use in my case of works which were predominantly just text.

 

[ron.alan]

[off-topic]
Most of your issues are one reason why I keep a Windows box. Four of your issues could be fixed in seconds with WordPerfect. MS Word and LibreOffice can't hold a candle to WordPerfect.
[/off-topic]

 

[KGIII]

My sister wrote a novel on a cell phone. This was way back when they weren't even all that much of a smart phone, somewhere in the mid-late 2000s, as I recall. Maybe later than that by a year or two, but certainly well over a decade ago.

She sent me a copy in PDF. I generated an ISBN for it.

I made a single-page site for the book.

I created a cover for it and had a dozen physical copies printed. I created an Amazon account and uploaded the PDF as an author. I did this for a few other sites that sell eBooks.

I edited the site to update it with the URLs to buy the book. I scattered a few links around at appropriate sites where submissions like that are acceptable.

I gave her the credentials for all of the above, including the associated email address that used the book's domain name.

I then told her, "Happy Birthday."

I'm pretty sure she has only sold a few copies of the printed work and a bit more than that in eBook format.

I suspect that she'd do better at selling if she put more effort in and kept on writing new material. She does none of those things with any degree of effort. She did start off but I suspect the lack of sales meant a lack of motivation.

I confess, I never read the book. I did skim through it, however. (It was not a subject I was inclined to read.)

 

[Fanboi]

I created a cover for it and had a dozen physical copies printed. I created an Amazon account and uploaded the PDF as an author. I did this for a few other sites that sell eBooks.

It seems they only accept .mobi, KF8, and ePUB (was mentioned) these days. I know they did once accept PDFs for books because I have a vague memory of that and I remember creating a mock PDF years back to see how the cover would look. Now, unless it's a comic or a heavily graphical thing like a cookbook, they want it "reflowable" (not sure how something the flows can flow again, lol), preferably in their proprietary formats.

I confess, I never read the book. I did skim through it, however. (It was not a subject I was inclined to read.)

I suppose you made it up to her with the hundreds (or thousands) worth of work you did for her

 

[KGIII]

It seems they only accept .mobi, KF8, and ePUB (was mentioned) these days.

To be clear, I'm just responding to your bit about asking for others who have some experience.

I'll be darned if I recall everything - though the domain still exists and my email would likely still exist. So, I could dive deeper.

I'm pretty sure that the first company, those that did the hard printing, was uploaded in .pdf and that they provided a few different file types after the file was uploaded. Those would have been automated conversions, surely. There's no way they had a human behind the scenes doing any sort of verification. The links were in the account as soon as I looked. (I can't say how long that was, but we're talking mere minutes.) So, it was an automated conversion.

The other services may not have accepted a PDF. I do not recall. I do know that I uploaded the PDF and the cover as separate items. That same company had the option to create an ISBN. That was free, as I recall. It was also optional, as I recall. I'm not sure why anyone would skip that step, but I know it was an option.

It was pretty painless. Just use a search engine to find an eBook seller and check out their options. I didn't pay a dime for anything but the hosting, which I already paid for. Well, that's not accurate. It's mostly accurate. I chose to pay for some physical prints of her novel but that wasn't required.

She could also sell the eBook and physical book direct from that same site.

I can probably do some searching to see if the company still exists or to remind me of what the domain name was. I checked and they're not linked on the site itself and I think that was because they took an obscene percentage for both digital and physical copies.

 

[Fanboi]

The other services may not have accepted a PDF. I do not recall. I do know that I uploaded the PDF and the cover as separate items. That same company had the option to create an ISBN. That was free, as I recall. It was also optional, as I recall.

It sounds like it could've been SmashWords, except for the cut you mentioned later on. There's is 10%. Which is lower than Amazon (but Amazon can get away with it).

I'd be curious about what else is out there. I'm going with KDP and I'll do one or two rounds KDP exclusive because you get free marketing and all that stuff that's a pain. Then, probably around the time I have an ISBN for it (KDP give you Amazon-specific numbers, and although ISBNs are free in SA, there's a "process" through our national library) I'll take it off exclusive and move to every platform.