Terry's Gedcom Publisher Tips

Custom "Front Matter" Pages

This page created 24 Jun 2019

Version note: Applies to Gedcom Publisher 1

This article is describes how to create custom "front matter" pages for an e-book produced with Gedcom Publisher. Other articles in my Gedcom Publisher Section cover other topics about using the program.

By default, Gedcom Publisher creates a title page and a table of contents, which are placed before the chapters containing the main content of the book. These pages are generally known in publishing as "front matter." Traditional books also commonly include other front matter, such as credits, dedication, forward (usually written by someone else), preface (usually written by the author), and acknowledgements. This article describes how to add such pages to your e-book, using as an example a Credits page.

Creating a Front Matter Page

The cover and front matter are managed in the Chapters section of the Gedcom Publisher interface where they are listed in the order they will appear in the book:

We create a new front matter page by clicking the + drop-down at the bottom of the window, which produces the list shown in the screenshot. We select Content Chapter because that is the only one in which we can freely specify the content – all the other Items listed are pre-defined in the program. An Add Content Chapter Item window appears:

First we complete these fields at the top of this window:

• Title – enter the title as we want it to appear on the page if we do want it to appear, otherwise enter anything meaningful to identify this "chapter" in the chapter list.
• Show Title – we uncheck this box because in this case we do not want the title to appear on the page.
• Include in Chapter Count – front matter is not considered a chapter, so we uncheck the box so it will not be counted. The chapter count is used by the program to number the actual content chapters.
• Center Content – since items in a credits list are generally centered, we check this box.

Now we are ready to add the content to our page.

Adding Content to the Page

To add content to the page we click the + drop-down at the bottom of the Add Content Chapter Item window, and see this list of potential content items:

Several of the content items are potentially useful for front matter pages, especially the Anchor Link, Image, and Link items. But for our credits page we choose the Text Item, and see the Edit Text Item window:

We enter a Title in this window. If we expected to have several content Items we might choose a more descriptive title, but since we expect to only use one the simple "text" will suffice.

The actual text to be placed in the page is entered in the Text field. But it must be written as HTML – the language of webpages. For those not comfortable writing in HTML using the HTML editor is a better choice. We click in the Text field and press the F7 key to open the editor::

Here we have entered a credit for the cover photo and also noted the source of the genealogical content. We might also have entered a credit to Gedcom Publisher here, but it automatically appears on the Title page, and removing it from there is tricky.

Several points should be noted about entering text like this in front matter pages:

• The text is entered here as left-justified. It will be in fact centered because we checked the "Center Content" box in the Add Content Chapter Item window, as shown above. We could instead have used the HTML editor tools to center the text.
• Often credit entries in books are placed toward the bottom of the page, and here we have spaced the text down several lines by using the enter key, in a nod to that convention. But e-book readers have screens of various sizes, and the reader rearranges the text to fit the available screen size. So if we add too many blank lines our first text may not appear on the first page, and the content may run over to another page or pages. So we add blank lines sparingly.
• The forced return after "1944" was entered with the shift-enter key combination, as is done on may word processors. There is also risk of unexpected results when trying control the length of lines for the same reason as above.

When we close the HTML editor, the Edit Text Item window, and the Add Content Chapter Item window we return to the Chapters section of the Gedcom Publisher interface:

Here we have moved our new Credits section up to the place we want it to appear, after the Title Page. We can do that either by dragging with the mouse or clicking it and using the up and down arrows at the bottom of the window.

When we re-make the book and navigate to the credits page, we see this:

Note how this particular view screen width demonstrates the risk of trying to manage the length of text lines ... the "about 1944" phrase that we had intended to be on the first line is displayed on its own line by the e-reader because of the text size and screen size being used.

Copyright 2000- by Terry Reigel