Though more of an alternate format than a true substitute to paper books, e-books are now a natural part of our book collections. Jutoh provides you with all the features you need to create professional e-books in EPUB, Kindle, or HTML format in one of the most intuitive ways I’ve had the chance to try. The entire process is both straightforward and rewarding, and the tool covers all aspects of the book creation, from the cover to the table of contents, and even the accessibility for persons with a print disability.
You can import text for your book by using an existing file or group of files in Word, HTML, ODT, TXT, CBZ, and even in EPUB, in case you want to add new features or check its validity. The program will analyze what you have and will try to transform that into a readable and well-structured e-book. As usual, the quality of the output will largely depend on the quality and structure of the input, if any. However, even building new titles and subtitles or creating a table of contents from scratch are tasks that Jutoh has managed to make easy and rewarding.
The program comes with an excellent Document Cleanup tool that automates most of the otherwise more boring tasks that we normally need to perform on an imported e-book. It will look for unwanted spaces, blank lines between paragraphs, unused bookmarks, line breaks, etc., and will remove them for you. It can also remove text and background colors that we don’t need anymore, or convert bookmarks into footnotes, to name but a few.
Jutoh includes an EPUB checker that makes sure that the overall structure of the e-book is consistent and navigable in a correct way. This combines perfectly with the program’s accessibility features (a truly welcome add-on that you won’t find in more sophisticated e-book editors, by the way) and its support for SVG and MathML and the option to create a text-and-audio synchronized book using TTS and MP3. Those features will allow you to add caption tags (alternative text) to describe images and tables and will mark up the book so that its structure is coherent and logical. On the theme of images, Jutoh not only supports the most common formats but can also manage their size so that they scale in a dynamic way to the various displays and devices that we use with our e-books. It comes with a cover designer that will let you create stunning front and back covers in no time.
Jutoh includes many more utilities and features, but I’ll leave those for you to discover. Suffice it to say that all aspects of the e-book creation process have been taken into account when designing this powerful, intuitive, and highly recommended software tool.
v2.2 [Sep 6, 2014]
- Added a new command File | Browse, showing details of the Jutoh projects in a folder.
- The template browser in the New Project dialog, and the Project | Import from Project command, now shows the project browser dialog. This can be disabled in advanced settings.
- Moved Copy Documents command to the Document menu, and added Delete Documents command for multiple document deletion.
- Added the ability to specify a shadow for a text box or image, with import from DOCX, ODT and HTML, and export to ODT and HTML. See the Background tab of the formatting dialog.
- DOCX text box import now takes rounded rectangle corner radius into account.
- Horizontal rules are now imported from DOCX.
- Fixed a display problem with centred text in text boxes when a right margin is present.
- Fixed a bug in text box output to ODT when no width is specified.
- Fixed a rounding error in the formatting dialog for fields containing dimensions in cm.
- Regular expression replacement can now use $0, $1, $2 etc. to represent the matching expression and subexpressions.
- Added advanced setting "Extra find and replace symbols" to specify more symbols that can be added in the Find and Replace dialog.
- The "Credit Jutoh" configuration option (generating contributor metadata for Jutoh) is now cleared by default by popular demand.
- Fixed a crash bug in the help system if a custom tag object was being viewed in the help results before the project containing it is closed.
- Made the Find dialog more compact.
- Fixed a problem when installing Kindle Previewer via Jutoh on Windows whereby the new Kindle Previewer helper command wasn't saved, so Launch didn't work without further fiddling.
- Worked around the Kindle for Mac copy error message box when launching a Mobipocket file, by deleting the file from Kindle's local storage first if possible.
- Fixed a bug whereby when multiple projects were loaded, the wrong document titles could be shown in the Inspector.
- Fixed a bug whereby if a name was specified and two images with the same name but different extensions were to be output (for example by a drawing object), the second image would reuse the first image's name.
- Fixed a Windows installation bug whereby the language used in the installer is not written correctly to the Jutoh registry area.
- After copying documents from another project with Document | Copy Documents, the project is now marked as modified so the changes are saved.
- Can no longer copy and paste a locked document, such as the special Content folder.
- When discarding styles after import, doesn't replace paragraph style names if they are found in the Jutoh style sheet.
- Added a warning if popup footnotes and endnotes are enabled at the same time, since it doesn't work on iBooks.
- Removed Slideshow command from the Document menu.
- When running Kindlegen, the original Mobipocket file is temporarily renamed to allow better detection of Kindlegen failure, for example if the title is missing.
- Added checking for a blank title and bad characters in the 'Book file name' configuration option.
- Added project file size to information page in Project Properties.
- The advanced TOC now includes folder names at the appropriate levels if folders have been used to structure the project.
- Added Preview button to book document properties dialog using the current settings in the dialog.
- Fixed a bug in Document Cleanup when replacing paragraph styles and deleting blank lines preceding the found paragraphs.
Organize and read e-books on PC effortlessly with support for multiple formats
