eBook Formatting Butler

Sadly, this add-on is no longer available.

Purpose

This add-on for Google Docs™ helps you prepare a manuscript for creating eBooks (Mobi or EPUB) and/or printed books (camera-ready PDF) through the Nepo Press web-based formatting service. It automates the “donkey work” of inserting the initial eBook typesetting markup into an existing manuscript.

Typically, the most tedious aspect of marking a manuscript for turning it into an eBook (or printed book) is marking the italicized words and phrases. Rather than finding each one to mark by hand, this add-on marks them all at once. It also fixes other common problems, such as those related to quotation and ellipsis marks.

This initial markup only needs to be done once per manuscript.

Quick Start

eBook Typesetting Markup

When you click on the blue “Apply eBook typesetting markup” button in the Sidebar, the add-on will perform the following actions on the manuscript:

Possible Problems

The initial markup process can take a long-time, perhaps up to 5 to 10 minutes, depending on the size of the manuscript. Please be patient. This is still a lot faster than marking it up “by hand”.

When it starts, you will see a “Processing …” message.

When the “Processing …” message changes to “Finished”, the actual modification of the manuscript is complete. However, it may take a while longer for the web browser to refresh fully.

If you get a “Failed” message instead of a “Finished” message, the solution is to split your document into several smaller documents, then process each smaller document individually, then reassemble them.

To split a large document, divide it into smaller documents, each containing no more than about 100 pages. So if you have a 300 page document named “stormy”, create 3 new documents, named perhaps “stormy1”, stormy2”, and “stormy3”. Then, copy and paste about a third of “stormy” into each of the three new documents.

To help keep track of where to “cut” the original document, you might add a line such as “FIXME: end of first part”, “FIXME: end of second part”, etc. (“FIXME” is unlikely to appear in your original document, so this is something easy to search for.)

After applying the markup to the three new documents (with the “Apply eBook typesetting markup” button in the sidebar), reassemble them. Just copy and paste them into a single new document.

More Information

For more information on marking up a manuscript, please see the documentation and videos here, especially the user manuals. To get a book account, if you don’t have one already, email .