Recipes
Introduction
Managing the Table of Contents
Table of Contents and ebook navigation
Book cover image
Managing multiple languages
Footnotes and Endnotes
Tracking External Link Use in Ebooks
On this page we’ve collected recipes of how to solve certain problems and how to manage common tasks when converting books using the Bookalope tools. Please contact us if you want to suggest a topic!
Like many other document editors Bookalope manages the Table of Contents (TOC) for you: it assembles the TOC from the headings in your document. However, you need to tell Bookalope where exactly it should place that generated TOC.
Remember that the paragraph labels on the Review page contained one particular label: the TOC item. That paragraph label is the key to telling Bookalope where to place a TOC. If in your book you label a number of consecutive paragraphs as TOC item, then Bookalope will know that these paragraphs are, in fact, a TOC.
So, when you later export your document e.g. as an ebook Bookalope will assemble a TOC and then replace these TOC item paragraphs with the newly generated one.
Also note that you should mark the paragraph Table of Contents as Chapter title and set its kind to “Table of Contents”, thereby telling Bookalope that the chapter this heading opens is a, and contains a TOC. Furthermore, if you export your document as an ebook and if your book does not contain a “toc” chapter then Bookalope will insert one (that’s because the ebook accessibility standard requires it).
In addition to the TOC that’s visible to the reader as part of the book, ebooks contain additional, internal navigation information. That navigation information is also constructed from the book’s headings information, but it contains all headings—whether they’re visible to the reader in the book’s TOC or not.
That means that while you can control whether a heading shows in the book’s TOC or on the page itself (see also here), you can not control the ebook’s internal navigation information. To ensure proper accessibility of all of your ebook’s content, Bookalope manages the internal navigation completely transparently for you!
As book designers we really do judge a book by its cover. Having an appealing book cover image is important, which is why Bookalope takes extra care of this step.
If you upload a file format which contains an explicit book cover image (e.g. an ebook) then Bookalope extracts that image and manages it automatically as the book’s cover image. If you upload metadata that contains cover image information then Bookalope handles that as well.
You can manage the book cover image of every Bookflow through its metadata page:
Here, you can browse for a local file to update the existing cover image, or you can click the Picture icon to have Bookalope generate a cover image for you (the text Generate cover image will be displayed). However, if you don’t want a book cover image at all for your book, click the Trashcan icon.
By default, Bookalope takes care of the cover image’s alternative text. If you enter a text here, though, Bookalope will use your text instead.
A book’s primary language is the language the book is written in, and often times it’s the only language used throughout the book. Every so often, though, you may have to work with a books which contains text passages in another, a secondary language, and it is important to treat those text passages with care.
Bookalope is able to detect, check, and mark up phrases in one or more secondary language to improve accessibility of the generated ebook and to fine-tune content checking. To enable multiple languages for your book, navigate to the Bookflow’s metadata and specify all languages that are used in the book:
Select the book’s primary language from the dropdown Language, and all secondary languages from the Other languages list below.
Now that you’ve set up your languages for the book, work your way to the Review page. There, under the More options section you find two settings:
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Check spelling: Enable spell checking using the dictionaries of all selected languages—the book’s primary language as well as all of its secondary languages. With spell checking enabled, Bookalope highlights words that it can’t find in any of the dictionaries as “Misspelled or unknown word”.
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Classify other languages: By enabling this option you ask Bookalope to find and mark up words, phrases, and sentences that are in any one of the secondary languages. To improve coverage (and to avoid fragmenting markup too much) Bookalope makes conservative attempts to consolidate words and phrases as much as possible.
You can enable and disable these two options independently as you need. Of course, you can fix misspelled words and add, modify, remove language markup on the Review page; find out more details on the content editor here.
There’s one caveat you need to be aware of, though. If you’ve enabled more than one secondary language for your book and if the same word (e.g. “also”) exists in multiple languages (e.g. “also” is an English and a German word) then Bookalope will mark up this issue for your review if it can’t make a reasonably safe guess as to which language a word belongs to.
Some books contain additional notes that are placed either at the bottom, the footer of a page (a “footnote”), in the side margin of a page (a “sidenote”), or at the end of a chapter or of the book (so-called “endnotes”).
Bookalope shows notes with a blue background directly inlined into the text to which they’re associated:
When you upload a document, Bookalope does its best to understand the notes in your document—footnotes and endnotes—and it tries to imports them as proper notes. Sometimes, however, it is difficult for Bookalope to determine with certainty that a paragraph is, in fact, intended to be a note. In that case, Bookalope labels the supposed note paragraph as such:
A paragraph that is labeled as a “Note” is imported as a note if it’s properly linked in both directions, i.e. if there is a link to the note paragraph and if that note paragraph starts with a link back to the original link. If that is not the case, then Bookalope currently considers the “Note” label as moot and treats the paragraph as plain text. (This bi-directional link constraint may be too strict, and we may loosen it in the future.)
Notice that importing a paragraph as a note moves and inlines that paragraph into the text which references the note paragraph in the first place. Therefore, you should label an “Endnotes” section header as Ignore to make sure that the header itself isn’t left dangling when all of its notes have been inlined.
If a note wasn’t imported correctly or if you’d like to add a new note to your text, then you can do so using the content editor on the Review page:
Simply add the note’s text into the paragraph, select the text to highlight it, and then click the “Note” icon to turn the selected text into a proper note.
When you export your book you can choose whether you’d like to export the notes in your book as footnotes or endnotes:
Depending on the export file format, Bookalope ensures that your notes are properly styled and accessible.
Online marketing campaigns often use so-called Urchin Tracking Module parameters (or UTM parameters) that are appended to a URL to gather data about where a visitor of a website comes from. You’ve probably seen such tracking parameters in your browser’s address field:
https://some.address.com/page?utm_source=there&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=giveaway
Notice all those utm_something parameters? They’re there to tell the website more information about the visitor and from where she navigated to the website.
Bookalope allows you to automatically add such tracking parameters to all external links in your ebook. That’s particularly useful if your ebook contains a publisher’s social media links or other resources, and if you’d like to learn how your readers use the external links in your ebook. Please note that this feature is available only with an Enterprise Plan.
Link tracking is easy to set up. Navigate to your Bookflow’s metadata page and fill in the form at the bottom:
While the Source of the tracking is always set to “ebook,” you can edit the Medium and Campaign fields to further refine the marketing tracking information. We recommend using the Medium to specify the ebook that contains the external links (e.g. by using the ebook’s ISBN), and you can add more information using the Campaign field.
Once the UTM parameters are defined for a specific Bookflow, you can check the Generate UTM Parameters checkbox when you convert your ebook:
That’s it! All that’s left to do now is to watch your marketing analytics tool pick up that information as readers click the external links in your ebook…
