Making an eBook with LaTeX

Having completely finished with the layout of my new book using XeLaTeX, I now want to make an eBook.  The error messages with LaTeX are always completely cryptic, so you normally have to debug by adding a single line of source and rebuilding to see if that break anything.   It is slow and tedious work, and this post contains a list of things I discovered using this method.

• Good document at http://folk.uio.no/simek/document/document.pdf
• can not use \documentclass{scrbook} — this causes an immediate failure with a cryptic error about \MessageBreak.   You have to use \documentclass{book} instead.
• Can not use \subtitle.   This might be a scrbook feature not available in the regular book
• Does not have support for \includegraphics — have to \usepackage{graphicx}
• graphic file name has to have the extension.  Solution to this is involved because it involves creating a command for including the graphic file name that manipulates the name differently depending upon whether it is an eBook or not.  Throughout the whole book I have change every graphic include:
  • used to be  \includegraphics[width=3in]{graphics/grfile01}
  • changed to \includegraphics[width=3in]{\graphicFile{grfile01}}
• Then I defined the new command graphicFile in the header for the versions of the book.  This gives a different folder for each version of the book, and it adds a ‘png’ extension for the eBook:
  • for normal book: \newcommand{\graphicFile}[1]{graphics/#1}
  • for eBook:  \newcommand{\graphicFile}[1]{graphicht/#1.png}
• All of the graphics need to be resized and converted to PNG format.