Making a book out of a document for epub export

For step 1, you can use this: http://in-tools.com/plugin.php?p=20

Harbs

http://www.in-tools.com

Innovations in Automation

I don't think anything like this has been done before. Congrats for finding a new workflow! But it seems you're going to have to invent everything by yourself.

Fortunately, your concept can be broken down into simple steps, each one standing on its own. From top of head, something like:

1. Dividing a story up into several discrete parts, each one starting with a chapter title.

2. Creating a new document with all the correct settings.

3. Copying text into this new document, adding pages where needed.

4. Gathering the new documents into a Book.

5. Exporting result of (4) to an Ebook.

For (1) there are a few different options. Perhaps a simple findText, looking for just the chapter style, is all you need. You can use the storyOffsets of the chapter styles to divide the story up in chunks.

(2) depends on how easy or complicated you want the script to be. By far easiest way is manually creating a template document, with all its size, styles, swatches, and master pages. All that's needed is then to open the template (ID will open a copy of the file by default). Advantage is that you can change the template and run the script again -- hey! presto, an entirely new layout for the same book.

Another way would be to have the script doing all that's needed -- a lot of repetitive code, and you will literally have to think of everything (especially don't rely on default settings, as the user might have changed these) --, but it has the advantage you don't need any external documents. Disadvantage is, you have to change the code if you want another document layout, or provide an interface for "most commonly changed items".

A while ago I proposed a JS snippet for (3) -- it's not as hard as it sounds (although an Autoflow feature when pasting text would have been useful). Should be in this forum somewhere.

(4) is mindboggling easy -- just a line of two, three. The Book object has all necessary functions.

(5) ... no idea at all. Never created an ebook.