Tutorials

In addition to the video tutorials in our Youtube channel and below, and in our detailed online manual, we also offer more technical Bookalope blog posts. If you still have questions about another topic or if you have a specific suggestion, feel free contact us so that we continue to expand our knowledge base!

An important principle

Bookalope is rather opinionated about structured content, and that’s good and necessary because we can create accessible books only if we work with meaningful and rich content. While at first it may seem cumbersome to review the structure labels of an uploaded document, it in fact ensures that all content becomes meaningful and therewith accessible. By separating the structured content of your book from its visual design presentation, Bookalope enables you to focus on content—independently of the medium for which eventually you will export the book. It also ensures that, when exporting a book as ebook or print book, the content is accessible, clean, and styled consistently across the whole book.

Online user manual

In addition to our video tutorials below, Bookalope offers an extensive online manual with much background information, a simple and complete example conversion, and a detailed guide that walks you through converting a document from start to finish. Our manual also talks about other aspects of using Bookalope, like managing your Profile and Plans, a number of useful recipes, and it encourages you to think outside of the box

Video Tutorials

Bookalope offers a thought-through set of intelligent tools that help you turn an invalid, outdated ebook or an unstructured book manuscript into an accessible ebook, beautiful print book, and other file formats to continue your professional production and design process. Whether you use the Bookalope extension for InDesign, our interactive website, or the cloud API, our video tutorials explain how it all works. You can visit our Youtube playlist or watch our tutorials right here.

Brief overview

A brief overview of how Bookalope works. Next, we recommend watching our series of video tutorials.

Part 1: Introduction

In this video we create an account with Bookalope, and take a first look around the platform features.

Part 2: Books and Bookshelves

In this video we learn how to manage books and bookshelves, and how to upload a file for conversion.

Part 3: Metadata and Settings

In this video we talk about the metadata for a book (including accessibility information) and other settings that help us customize and improve our book conversion.

Part 4: Review

After uploading your file, Bookalope gets to work: it analyzes the structure of the book and deep-cleans its content. Depending on the settings, Bookalope also looks for text in foreign languages and highlights other issues. The Review step is where you can adjust and accept Bookalope’s results.

Part 5: Conversion

In this last step we convert and export the final book in various formats: accessible ebook, print-ready and accessible PDF, a structured InDesign document, Word, or various flavors of XML.

Video Recipes

Our recipes walk you through particular features in short, insightful videos. If you wonder how to tackle this or that problem when working with your book manuscripts then you’ll probably find a recipe video here in our Youtube playlist or you can contact us to request one.

Book cover images

In this short recipe video we show the different options of handling your book’s cover image.

Table of contents

In this recipe we show how you can create and manage the table of contents for your book .

Structure preview

In this recipe we discuss the “Default View” and the “Structure Preview View” of your book, why you would want to use them, and how you switch between these two views.

Key shortcuts and views

In this recipe we discuss the different key shortcuts that toggle between the different document views, and what those views are good for.

Bulk-selecting elements

In this recipe we discuss the different ways of bulk-selecting elements of your book for labeling using various key shortcuts.

Multiple languages

In this short recipe video we show how to handle books with multiple languages, one primary language of the main text and other foreign language words, phrases, or quotations.

Restarting a conversion

On rare occasions users upload documents that Bookalope fails to process. We then fix the issue, deploy an update to Bookalope, and ask the user to restart their book conversion. In this short recipe video we show how to do exactly that.