________
 

The Downtown Writers Network is a resource for independent writers in central Ohio.

Located in Columbus, we provide services to freelancers, businesses that use freelance talent, and all creative writers in the dynamic mid-Ohio market.

    

The Microsoft Reader

ReaderWorks

Like the Reader itself, ReaderWorks is freeware. It's a relatively easy program to use, and it will turn your words it into an electronic book based on the current OEB standard.


Plain Text

HTML
ReaderWorks can handle two types of documents, either plain text ASCII or HTML. Both types are easy to process. You just load the document into ReaderWorks, and click the "Build eBook" button. In less than a minute, ReaderWorks turns your piece into an e-book that then opens automatically in the Reader.

However, the quality is quite different between the two document types. ReaderWorks turns a text document into a plain, unformatted electronic book -- basically text with paragraph breaks. It's readable, but not especially attractive.

For a professional-looking piece, you need to give ReaderWorks an HTML document, instead. If you have a recent version of Word or WordPerfect, this is a simple task. Just save your work as a "web document" (with the ".htm" or ".html" suffix). The word processor takes care of the hypertext codes for you. Then load the new HTML document into ReaderWorks, to get an e-book version that pretty closely resembles your original Word or WordPerfect copy.

If you want even greater control over the e-book's appearance, cut and paste your document into an HTML editor. This way, you gain many of the formatting possibilities that you'd have on a web page. Microsoft suggests FrontPage for this task (no surprise there, since that's another Microsoft product), but almost any HTML authoring program will work fine. The basic Netscape Composer, for example, does just as good a job as FrontPage or HotMetal.

Next : Practical Applications
1, 2, 3, 4