upload - bookalope/Bookalope GitHub Wiki

Starting a new Bookflow is easy on this first page, and here’s how that works.

Click the Browse… button to open a file browser, and select the book file that you’d like to upload to Bookalope. When you’ve selected the file, its file name will show in the text field to the right of the Browse… button.

Next, click the Upload file and Continue button. Your browser will now upload the selected file to the Bookalope server and you’ll see the Processing… page. You can just linger on that page until Bookalope moves you to the Review step, or you can return to your list of Books or Bookflows and continue working on something else.

When Bookalope processes your upload, it not only extracts and structures the content from your document, it also automatically cleans up heaps of different issues commonly found in manuscripts:

• Collapse spaces: Any two or more spaces, tabs, or other whitespace characters are replaced with a simple space.
• Fix typewriter quotation marks: From an aesthetic and typographical point of view, straight typewriter quotation marks and apostrophes (i.e. " and ') should be replaced with their curly equivalents (i.e. “ ” and ‘ ’), unless these marks denote units of measurement.
• Clean up and fix hyphens: The hyphen character is used in different contexts to denote different features: to break words across lines, to indicate an abrupt change of thought, to express a range, or to represent a mathematical minus. Typographically, however, these different features should be expressed using different variations of the hyphen: e.g. a breaking hyphen, an em-dash or en-dash, or an actual minus sign. Bookalope cleans up suspicious uses of the standard hyphen whenever possible, and replaces them with their proper typographical equivalents.
• Maintain existing page breaks: If you’re importing your book from a paged file format (e.g. a Word document) then the extracted content contains the page breaks from that original document.

In general Bookalope errs on the conservative side, which means that ambiguous issues are not cleaned up automatically but marked up for review on the next page.

Bookalope has a file size limit of 256MB per file, which should be enough for most books. Please contact us if your original book files are larger than that!

The list of file formats that you can currently upload to Bookalope is quite long. The most common formats that we see are Microsoft Word (DOC or DOCX) and ebooks in EPUB2 or EPUB3 format; less common are OpenDocument (ODT), rich text format (RTF), or Apple Pages. For a complete list of supported input file formats, you can query the Bookalope server directly using the dedicated cloud API endpoint.

Please note that Bookalope does not support uploading Adobe PDF or Adobe InDesign files INDD or IDML. If you’d like to upload an InDesign document then please use our Bookalope extension for InDesign to push a document directly from InDesign to the Bookalope server. Please contact us if you need to import a currently unsupported file format!