How to create ebooks for the Acer Aspire

It's quiet easy to create your own PDF e-books from plain text files (such as those obtained from Project Guttenburg) using OpenOffice. The resulting e-books can be read using the Acrobat reader with the Aspire One held like a regular book. It may seem a bit of a chore configuring the text but having formatted one book you can copy it, delete all the text and there you have a template. All you have to do after that is copy&paste the text into it every time you want to create a new book. I'd be interested to know how people find this way of creating and reading e-books. (It costs nothing and you can tweak the layout to your own taste)

CREATING THE E-BOOK

(1) Download a plain text e-book from a free source such as the Guttenberg Project.

(2) Open your text in OpenOffice and tidy it up, removing redundant blank lines etc. Alternatively, use a plain text editor to clean up the text. The editing features provided in plain text editors are usually much more powerful than you get with standard wordprocessors. Remove all leading indents, leading and trailing spaces and remove all multiple blank lines. Paragraphs should also be reformatted so you get rid of hard-returns and they wrap correctly. Remember you have Vi onboard Linux machines, an ideal editor for this sort of global reformatting.

(3) Configure page size, margins, line-spacing, page numbers and fonts in OpenOffice.

These are the settings I use and which I have found most comfortable but you might want to tweak them a bit. The page width and height are the only critical values.

(3a) Configure page size and margins as follows:

Select menu options { FORMAT > PAGE } and enter the following settings:

• Width { 160mm }
  Height { 290mm }

• Top margin { 5mm }
  Bottom margin { 8mm }
  Right margin { 2mm }
  Left margin { 2mm }

(3b) Configure line-spacing as follows:

Press { CTRL + A } to select the whole document and...

Select menu options { FORMAT > PARAGRAPH } and enter settings...

• Spacing below paragraph { 5mm }
  Line spacing { Proportional, 110% }

(3c) Configure the font as follows:

Click menu options { FORMAT > CHARACTER } and enter settings...

• Font { Garuda }
  Typeface { Regular }
  Size { 18 }

NB. Sans Serif fonts are generally regarded as best for on-line reading due to the poor resolution of computer screens. Serif fonts tend to look a bit grainy. Verdana would be the ideal font to use but Garuda is the equivalent under Linux.

(4) Insert page numbering:

(4a) Create the footer field:

Select menu options { FORMAT > PAGE > FOOTER }

Spacing, Height { 5mm }

(4b) Insert page number in footer:

Click inside the footer field then selectn menu options { INSERT > FIELDS > PAGE NUMBERS }

(4c) Center the page number:

Select menu options { FORMAT > PARAGRAPH > ALIGNMENT } then click radio-button { CENTER }

(5) Export the OpenOffice document to a PDF file:

Select menu options { FILE > EXPORT AS PDF }

READING THE E-BOOK

(1) Click on the file name to open the e-book in Acrobat

(2) Press Control, Shift, Plus { CTRL + SHIFT + "+" } to rotate the page

(3) Press Control, L { CTRL + "L" } to view full screen.

You can now hold your Acer like a book and press { ENTER } for next page or { RIGHT ARROW } for Next Page and { LEFT ARROW } for Previous Page. The keys are not very intuitive as you have rotated the device but you soon get used to it.

(4) Press Control, Shift, N { CTRL + SHIFT + "N" } to jump to a specific page number.

(5) Remember to configure the following setting in Acrobat so that you can reopen the your e-book at the last page you were reading:

• Select menu options { Edit > Preferences }
  Then tick check-box { Restore last view settings when reopening documents }