Making an Epub

Last night, I finished updating my template for the cover and started trying to make an epub. I'm not perfectly satisfied yet, but I made a good start.

The updated cover template has a border with runes, an updated wordmark, and a region for the contents. I updated the cover for my test Issue 0 Q3 2026 if you want to see what it looks like.

I tried using Libreoffice for making an epub. I copied-and-pasted the webpages for the editorial and stories into a document, stuck in a section for biographies, put the cover image up front, and added images for tailpieces at the section breaks. (I found a cute series of woodcuts by Hermann Paul of demonic faces that are in the public domain and go along with our style.)

Libreoffice has a tool to export as epub. I hadn't used it before, but it didn't seem very complicated. I played around with the settings and formatting a bit to get things to show up the way I wanted.

The results are not very pretty. I also couldn't figure out how to add a table of contents or to get the tailpieces to appear centered. I've looked at some other epubs that do have those features, so it may just be a limitation of the tool.

As a first effort, it's not bad, but I'll probably do a bit more experimentation to see if I can find a more satisfactory tool. For converting from manuscript to markdown (to post on the web) I'm planning to use pandoc. I think it can also generate epubs, so I'll try experimenting with it next.