Adding pages for ipad that don't up as Chapters

[kaatmal]

I am new to Storyist so please forgive the ignorance of some of these questions. I have 2 at the moment that are really vexing me.

 

1. The first is I am trying to make sure that the first few pages of the book I am exporting to epub format for ipad/iphone do not show up as chapters if the user presses the chapter button in the ibooks. For example, the title page,copyright info, and dedication pages would all fall into this category. The only way I can get them to show up is to make them chapters, but I have other ibooks from successful authors where these pages are present but excluded from the chapters section. Any help here would be great.

 

2. If I wanted to add additional spacing between the chapter name and the first line of the chapter, how do I do this? When I add returns in Storyist and then save as epub and import to itune/put on my ipad, it always goes back to the same distance between the Chapter Heading and the first line of the text.

 

As a bonus, is there a way to add a drop shadow to the chapter names? I saw this done in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson series on ipad and would like to try it here too.

 

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

-Chuck

[marguerite]

Hi, Chuck:

Welcome to the forums. I can answer 1. Steve (the Storyist developer) has answered 2 elsewhere—try searching the Using Storyist and Troubleshooting forums or running a search. I suspect 3 is done by creating an image file in another program and inserting it as a graphic into the Storyist file, which you could do here, using the chapter numbers as the entries that show up in the table of contents.

 

For 1, what I do is create entries in the Notebook for title page, copyright page, and anything else that I want in the file but do not want to be confused with chapters. Then when I export the ePub or MOBI file, I click on those notes and drag them into position above the manuscript.

 

This still creates an entry in the table of contents, but it is clear that these are not part of the main text. If you don't want even the entry, then I think you have to edit the ePub file after exporting. Steve has a video tutorial on that, which you can find at the Storyist site. You will be using those instructions to alter the chapter title spacing as well.

 

Note that Apple has some guideline that requires every file included in the ePub to be listed in one of the metadata files. Make sure you don't violate this guideline while making your post-production changes, or your file will get rejected in iTunes Producer.

Best,

Marguerite

[kaatmal]

Awesome. Thanks for the tips. I ran across one more issue. When I added the Notebook entries (Tile Page, Legal Copy, Dedication and Foreword) above my first "chapter", which is the Table of Contents and then exported, everything worked great when flipping through the book. However, when I use the ipad's built in Chapters button, it does not show what my first chapter is (in this case my Table of Contents). I double checked that my first line is set to Heading 1 like the rest of the chapters that do show up. Everything looks right in the project view and is right when flipping the pages of the epub on the ipad like I mentioned. It's just that the first chapter doesn't show up in the ipad's TOC list.

 

Am I missing something simple here?

[marguerite]

I don't think I understand. The Table of Contents is not a chapter. It is a list that Storyist creates on the fly during export from the actual chapter titles, styled with the Chapter Title style.

 

Do you have a chapter ahead of your text, inside your manuscript, called Table of Contents? That is probably confusing the exporter. (Guess, not knowledge! )

Best,

M

[kaatmal]

Yep, it was the name that threw it off. In fact, if I just put 1 space at the end of the title, it then shows up fine as a chapter in the ibooks chapter button. Strange. Thanks for the help.

[marguerite]

You are most welcome.

Good luck with the book!

M