<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<font face="Liberation Serif">There has been a lot of discussion
about making ePubs or ebooks from Scribus, or from Scribus files,
but I'm in the process of going in the other direction. <br>
The specific task is making something usable from the list of
diagnostic codes (ICD 10). This is voluminous. Just a simple text
file listing of the codes is 13MB. <br>
<br>
After first creating a database in Postgresql so I could slice and
dice the information, I began with Sigil. Maybe not surprisingly,
Sigil can't really handle this much in one ebook (it can if you're
willing to wait 20-30 minutes for saving sessions or creating a
TOC). I broke it down into smaller yet still sizeable chunks, with
which Sigil can still be a bit sluggish, but it does work.<br>
<br>
The next issue was the ePub reader on my tablet (Nexus 7), which
gags and chokes when trying to navigate these large files. eBook
readers also don't have a lot of flexibility with typeface, etc,
so I decided to use the output of the Sigil to feed into Scribus
to make PDFs. (I made a PDF using calibre from the ePub, but the
quality was not acceptable) Even though Scribus can import HTML,
it doesn't recognize the xhtml files from Sigil. Also, even though
I might check the box on the importer to "remember this file
association" with HTML, Scribus doesn't remember.<br>
<br>
The end results are actually quite good, and certainly the Android
Adobe Reader is much superior to any eBook reader I've tried.<br>
<br>
Scribus is known of course for slowing down when files get big,
but I just finished a section of 549 pages (US Letter), which was
a bit sluggish, but saving the file or even exporting to PDF
didn't take all that long. For some reason, importing a paragraph
style is very time consuming, even before you've used it.<br>
<br>
Greg<br>
</font>
</body>
</html>