EZ Ebook Templates

Since I’m not a very good psychic, I’d like you to tell me what you want to learn how to do with OpenOffice Writer and EZ Ebook Templates.

No matter how silly you think your request is, post it up here and I’ll place up a tutorial explaining how to get it done.

Why am I doing this?

To make this site a better fountain for learning. And the best way to do that is to hear from you!

So, just post up a quick, or long, comment telling me what you’re having trouble with and I’ll create a freely available tutorial just for you.

And, before you get too sheepish about adding your request, just remember, you may not be the only person struggling with an issue

I look forward to hearing what you have to say.

Let’s work together to make this site a better place to learn!

In the first portion of this tutorial, we assembled our tools. And, discovered some free places to amass even more cool stuff to add to our own OOo ebook template designs.

Now, in Part 2, we’ll actually begin the first steps to building our own OpenOffice Writer ebook templates. Don’t worry, it’s really easy to do. For simple designs. We’ll cover the tougher stuff in later tutorials :-).

So, let’s get started. . .

STEP 1: Open Up OpenOffice Writer

Pretty self explanatory, just open up the OOo program and create a new Text Document. You can do that by clicking on “File> New”, but since you’ve just opened up the program there should already be a new Text Document there waiting for you to add content to

And here’s what it should look like:

STEP 2: Insert A “Default” Header & Footer Into The Document

Again, pretty simple, but here’s the actual ‘break down’ on how to do this . . . .

Go To: Insert > Header > Default

You will now see a new table looking portion at the top of your new text document:

Now, to insert the footer, do the same thing:

Go To: Insert > Footer > Default

Again, you will see a new table portion at the very bottom of your new text document:

The next thing you should do is enter some basic text inside both the Header and Footer.

Normally, I simply add “Ebook Title Here” or “Author Name” inside the Header section along with the Page Number that I either set to the far left or far right.

**Quick Tip : You can also add in a table to better separate any text and page numbering to make things flow better inside your headers and footers.

To add a Page Number count, simply go to: Insert > Fields > Page Number and it will show up wherever you place it. You can find the text alignment settings in the upper toolbar inside OpenOffice Writer shown here:

And here’s what I came up with for my Header default text:

To separate the “Ebook Title Here” text and the Page Number, I just added extra spaces with the space bar.

Now, do the same thing with the Footer. Personally, I like to add something like: “copyright(c)2008 Your Name or Site Link Here” in this area, but you may want to do something different.

Again, you can right align, left align, or center align this text just as you did with the Header text in the same manner.

Here’s what I ended up with:

To get the neato copyright symbol, just go to: Insert > Special Character and a new window will pop open, then just find the copyright symbol, click on it, hit OK and it will auto insert it.

You can also insert a table to add and separate text and special fields section such as Page Numbering( as mentioned earlier ).

Do this by following: Table > Insert > Table

You can make further adjustments to the inserted table after you have put it inside the area you want it to be in by Right Clicking inside one of the table portions, or “cells”.

A new window will pop open giving you plenty of options for adding colors, borders, background colors, table size proportions, and more. Just play around with the settings to see what you can come up with.

Also, to adjust the column widths, you can simply left click and hold the button then drag the middle column line.

STEP 3: Select A “Page” Background Image & Add It

To add an image to the entire ebook, or “Page”, background area, you will need to right click somewhere inside the new Text Document “white area” — this is exactly what it sounds like — the “white” area within the text document that isn’t inside the Header or Footer areas you just added.

This will bring up a menu. Inside this menu, find the linked word: “Page” and left click it once.

A new window will be brought up that looks like this, or similar to this depending on your computer operating system:

Remember too that you can use any .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif image you want for the background.

Personally, I would try and stay away from backgrounds that don’t provide a center “white” area for your ebook contents. This would make reading much more difficult for your audience.

However, you can always add a table right on top of the background image you select that is filled with the color white. That would solve the problem

STEP 4: Add Your Ebook Content

Now that you have your background in place — if you choose to use one — and your Header + Footer added, all that’s left to do is add your ebook content.

When I use the word “content” I’m mostly always referring to text contents. But, you could be creating a graphical ebook. At any rate, all that’s left to do is add your own stuff inside your ebook template.

STEP 5: Save Your Work & Export As A PDF

Pretty easy here.

Just hit: “File > Save”

or, you can also use the little blue floppy disc icon on the toolbar — just left click it once

Either one will save the document. And of course you’ll have to give your new ebook .ODT file a name.

Then, all that’s left to do is hit the little PDF icon and presto! You have your own uniquely designed ebook.

In both editable .ODT format and non-editable .PDF format to pass out to your customers/readers.

CONCLUSION

Don’t be afraid to play around with font settings for your text, sizes, colors, adding plain colors to your ebook background, and changing your header/footer styles.

You can come up with great looking ebooks no matter what your skill level. It’s all about playing

Well, I hope you enjoyed the tutorial.

I’ll be adding more in the near future.

And, while you wait, be sure to have a little fun out there!

Yeah, I know I called the post “How To Edit EZ Ebook Template Backgrounds”, but the tips in this tutorial will help you understand how to edit any graphical element in any of the EZ Ebook Template Packages.

So, without further delay, here’s how to do it — step by step.

We’ll start out editing one of the backgrounds from the first EZ Ebook Template Package. And, it’s a background that can be rather tricky if you’re brand new at this type of editing.

Here’s what the image looks like before we make any changes:

It’s important to understand that this, and a majority of the other graphical design elements included in the EZ Ebook Template Packages are used inside the actual ebook templates as .jpg or .jpeg images. However, they do come in 2 different forms inside your EZ Ebook Template Package. One is the standard .jpg or .jpeg format, and the other is the completely editable .psd format.

And, so, the .psd file is the file we’ll be working with in this tutorial.

So, we need to locate the .psd file for the image we want to edit.

The image we’ll be using in this first portion of the tutorial can be found inside the EZ Ebook Template Package #1 file folder, within an internal folder named “PSD Files“.

You will be looking for a file named: “side background 2.psd“.

To open it up and begin editing, usually, I will simply double left click on the file. This will bring up the image inside your existing image editing program. For me, this is Photoshop 7.0. For you, it could be something different.

And, if that’s the case, then what you will want to do is Right Click on the file and choose the “Open With” option from the pop up menu. And open the image with the image editing program of your choice that exists on your computer system.

Once it’s open, it’s time to begin the editing process.

Editing this background is pretty simple. But I’ll show you how to not only edit the text, but also, how to quickly change the color of the background too.

FIRST STEP: CHANGING THE TEXT

This is the first thing you should see when opening up your image inside Photoshop:

To make changes to the text, we’ll need to left click on the Text layer, represented by the big “T” shown above.

Once our Text layer is selected, we need to also left click, or select the Text Tool:

Once you have done that, it’s time to left click anywhere inside our text layer, like this:

You should see a little squiggly flashing line, as shown above. Obviously because this is a screen capture, it isn’t blinking, but inside Photoshop, it will be.

Then we need to highlight our text by left clicking, holding it down and dragging across our text. You should come up with something similar looking to this:

Now, all we need to do is type in our own text. Normally, this will be the title of your ebook.

You should end up with something similar to this:

And done!

Well, not quite. We still have to save our new image.

To save your image for use in your EZ Ebook Template, you will need to deselect the Text Tool inside Photoshop. Which is where you should still be at this point.

You can do that by selecting the “Move Tool” that looks like this:

Once that tool has been selected, simply click on: File > Save For Web. .

A new window will pop open that should look similar to this:

You’re going to want to make sure that you’re saving the image as a .jpg or .jpeg file. You select this setting from the drop down menu shown below if it isn’t already selected:

You will also want to be sure that the quality is turned all the way up to 100%:

Then, simply hit the “SAVE” button.

A new window will pop open that will give you the option to name, or rename your image.

It might be a good idea to give your edited graphic background a different name, such as “side background 2a”, so that you don’t get it confused with the original, in case you decide to resell the package

If we want, we can also change the background and text colors of our graphic.

Here’s how to change the background color easily.

Left click the “Background” layer to select it, found at the bottom:

Next, you will want to select the “Paint Bucket” tool:

Then select the new color you’d like to fill the background in with using the color swatches either on the tool bar itself, or from the swatches palette. In this example, we’ll stick to the color swatches on the tool bar:

USING THE TOOL BAR COLOR SWATCHES

Double click on the color swatch and an new color tool window will open allowing you to select a new color:

Once you select a different color you are happy with, simply hit the “OK” button, and it will automatically show up in the tool bar color swatch.

Now all you have to do is select the “Paint Bucket” tool, and left click once anywhere inside the “Background” layer of the image. And the color is now changed:

You can do the same thing for changing the text color, but by using the “Blending Options”.

Here’s how to do it:

Right Click on the Text layer and select from the corresponding menu “Blending Options”.

A new window will appear that looks like this:

You will notice that the Drop Shadow, Inner Shadow, and Stroke options have already been set.

To make changes to those, simply left click on the corresponding options text. In other words, to change the Stroke settings, left click directly on the text “Stroke”.

You will see the window change to reflect this:

Here, you can change the width of the stroke line from “1″ to “3″, “4″, “10″, “16″ or any width you wish. Remember, the width is calculated by pixels.

You can change the color by double clicking on the Fill Type color box/swatch.

Do the same things with all the Blending Options pre-selected to see what you come up with.

The last thing to do to change the color of the text entirely, is to add a new Blending Option.

The Color Overlay:

You should see the text change color inside your graphic image already.

Now you can left click the color swatch box shown above and play around until you get a color you like.

Then, as explained before, simply “Save For Web. .” and you’re all done!

Now, we can close down Photoshop. But, before we do, DO NOT save any changes you’ve made to the .PSD file. And Photoshop will ask you if you’d like to “save changes” to the original .psd before it closes. DO NOT!!

Otherwise, it will change the original completely applying any changes you’ve made to it. Plus, it’s always good to start with the original later on to get the same color scheme and text. Remember, you can always go back and change them again. But it’s best to do it from the beginning.

It’s time to put our new graphic background into our ebook template.

And here’s how to do it:

Begin by opening up the EZ Ebook Template inside OpenOffice Writer that you wish to change the background graphic on.

We want to go to the direct TOP of our template as this layout is completely done inside a huge Table.

Up at the top, left click once inside the far left hand column.

Then simply right click for the menu to open.

From this menu, select: > Table. .

You should now see this in the new window that pops up:

Hit The “Browse” button to navigate to your new graphic background you wan to add.

Locate the file and select it by left clicking.

Then, simply hit “Open”.

You should now see your graphic inside the “preview” section:

Make sure the “Tile” radio button on the left hand side is selected, and then hit “OK”.

You should now see your new background showing up:

Follow the same steps above for the Right hand side of the ebook template.

And here’s what I ended up with:

Yours will no doubt be different

Well, I hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and that you’ve come away with a greater knowledge of how to change the backgrounds inside your EZ Ebook Templates.