Creating eBooks

Typemill offers a free eBook Plugin, which transforms your Typemill website into a comprehensive eBook studio. With this plugin, you can create one or multiple eBooks in PDF and EPUB formats, all directly from your existing content.

This chapter guides you through each step of the eBook production process.

Install the eBook Plugin

The Typemill Publisher Bundle comes pre-equipped with all necessary plugins and themes for managing multiple eBooks. Alternatively, you can initiate your work from a fresh Typemill installation and manually add the eBook Plugin.

1. Download the eBook Plugin from the plugin directory.
2. Extract the ZIP file.
3. Upload the extracted folder to the /plugins directory of your Typemill installation.
4. In the Typemill backend, navigate to System → Plugins.
5. Activate the eBook plugin and access its settings.

Plugin Configuration Options

The plugin features two primary modes:

• eBooks in Settings: This mode allows you to generate multiple eBooks from the entire website or from selected projects. It adds a new menu item labeled "eBooks" under the System section, accessible only to the admin.
• eBooks in Pages: This mode enables you to create eBooks from a single project, specific subfolders, or individual pages. It adds a new "eBooks" tab to each page in the editor, available to authors.

For this guide, we will utilize the eBooks in Pages mode, allowing the project author to generate and manage the eBook independently.

Create an eBook

When you open any page in the content area, you will notice a new tab labeled eBooks above each page. Click on it to access the eBook Studio, which comprises three tabs:

• Content: Here, you can select the content to include in your eBook project. Generally, you will choose the entire content of a project, but you can also deselect any pages you wish to exclude.
• PDF: In this tab, you can select a layout for your PDF version and customize details such as the title page, imprint, table of contents, fonts, and colors. Once configured, you can either generate the PDF or preview it.
• EPUB: This tab allows you to define metadata for the EPUB version and generate it with a single click.

For our Fundraising Handbook, we will open the homepage of the fundraising project to create an eBook encompassing the project's entire content.

Step 1: Select Content

Navigate to the project's homepage and open the eBook tab. In the Content tab, choose the pages you want to include in the Fundraising Handbook. When you select a page, a preview of the table of contents will appear on the right side. Above the headline preview, you can adjust the headline levels to ensure the structure is logical.

If you modify the structure of your website—such as adding, deleting, or moving pages, you will need to refresh the navigation and select the content pages once more.

Step 3: Configure the PDF

After selecting the content, switch to the PDF tab. Here, you can choose a layout and configure your PDF. For the Fundraising Handbook, we will select the Report layout, which offers a clean A4 format with a professional design.

Each layout possesses its own settings. For example, the Report layout features the following configuration sections:

• Cover: Title, subtitle, footer text, logo, background image, and colors.
• Text: Font size, font families, text alignment, hyphenation, and colors.
• Imprint: Text for imprint and preface.
• Table of Contents: Headline, number of levels for the automatically generated TOC, optional prefixes, and line indents.
• Paging: Optional page numbers and running footers.
• Blurb: Text for afterword or additional notes.

Tip: If you desire a completely unique design, consider hiring a developer. Creating an eBook layout is quite similar to developing a Typemill theme, offering significant flexibility.

Step 4: Generate the PDF

At the bottom of the PDF configuration options, you have two choices:

• Preview the PDF: The preview button opens a new window that renders the eBook layout as a website, allowing you to verify if the design meets your expectations. You can also create a PDF from this preview using your browser’s “Save to PDF” feature. Please note that results may vary across browsers. The preview utilizes Pagedjs in the background.
• Generate the PDF: This option allows you to create a final PDF version with a single click. The file will be stored in the media library and will be listed below the content once it’s ready. This generation utilizes Typemill’s hosted PDF service Kixote, which requires a MAKER or BUSINESS license. These licenses include a monthly token allowance for generating PDFs. The PDF service operates with WeasyPrint in the background.

Be aware that the preview and the remote PDF generation employ different technologies. Certain features may work in the remote version but not in the preview, and vice versa. For instance, the remote PDF generation supports bookmarks, whereas the preview version supports JavaScript execution.