C stuff, LibreOffice, and ePUB

2023-06-24T23:27:33Z

I've been staying mostly offline for the last few days. Between getting some rather disrespectful and outright hate-fueled content thrown my way by social media people (in my RSS feeds), and just a general mass of negativity from the web/net as a whole, I've been trying to keep my focus elsewhere. Even gopher hasn't exactly been a place for positivity lately.

As such, I've been once again trying to learn C a bit more. "Learn C on the Mac" by Dave Mark has been a great help, given that I'm trying to do all of this on my MacBook Pro in Snow Leopard. And despite what I keep hearing from people (especially in the Rust community), C hasn't been that difficult for me so far. Sure, I'm not even done with the basics, but that's why I said so far. We'll see how well it goes in the future.

I've also been trying to figure out a good alternative to Pages '09 for making ePUB versions of my writing. Just in case I have to leave the MacOS platform for something like Linux or Windows in the future.

I tried getting the writer2epub extension working, but alas, it just doesn't run on either OpenOffice, LibreOffice, or NeoOffice for Snow Leopard. And the developer has seemingly disappeared, with all development dropped...because LibreOffice added built-in ePub export, and that was probably enough to make others sort of bully the dev into not updating (because that community hasn't pissed off enough people yet). So, I gave that a whirl.

It works. I'm having to do the testing in my Windows 7 install, but it works. Just... I can't get the cover image thing working properly, and the documentation doesn't say too much about any sort of troubleshooting. It doesn't even give me a size or aspect guideline for the file, or say what file types are supported. I've been having to guess this entire time.

That said, I know Calibre can export files to ePUB as well, so I'll be giving that a shot later. Here's hoping it's a bit more customizable than LibreOffice's offering. If nothing else, I can use my legacy version of Scrivener for Windows to do the work, because I know it works well. I just don't have a working Scrivener for 10.6.8...and that may eventually be a good thing.

For now, I think some gaming is in order. Just not sure what to play.

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The Author's Nest

C stuff, LibreOffice, and ePUB