How to transfer books from Word or Publisher to Bloom?

Bloom
1

Is there a faster way to transfer books from Word or Publisher to Bloom than copying and pasting all the text blocks and all pictures page by page?

2

There is not, and there never will be. It might sound painful, but in truth, copying and pasting is trivial. If there was an import, there would always be edge-cases you had to discover and deal with, and in the end that would be slower than the current method.

3

As there’s no other options than copying/pasting, I’ll share my experiences/suggestions:

  • create all the page layouts that are needed for each page within the book (e.g. if you have one picture and two text boxes beside it in Publisher, then create a layout in Bloom that is similar)

  • if you already have a page of the same layout in the book, use the Duplicate page option. (I find that easier than clicking Add page, then choosing the page template).

  • if one page is slightly different in layout, you can change that later

  • if you have the layouts already setup in Bloom, you can focus on the copying/pasting without needing to switch between changing the page layout and pasting text/images.

4

This is a complete noob question, but … I cannot copy paste from a Libreoffice doc or .txt file into a text box on a Bloom book page, neither using copy/paste with a mouse nor Control C/V. What’s the secret?

Ian

5

I’ve just tried myself and it seems to work properly.

With a document open in LibreOffice, I copied the text, then I clicked within a textbox in Bloom, and pasted the text. (It worked with both mouse and keyboard shortcuts).

Are you trying to paste text when you’re in Change-layout mode? (Click Change-layout at the top to switch mode)

Or is it a box you have manually created, but haven’t specified whether it’s Picture, Video, or Text?

(Click Change-layout and if you see something like this, then you need to choose Text).

6

No, I think it’s probably a Linux problem. I’ll just double-check on a Windows machine then send in an error report. Thanks for checking though.

7

In Bloom for Linux I have had more success using the paste button in Bloom’s toolbar. Ctrl-c and ctrl-v work “sometimes” but not always. I haven’t figured out a context for this.

8

What version of Bloom are you using? in 4.3.105 (bloom-desktop, latest update) under Wasta 18.04 I am not seeing this problem anymore. Ctrl-v and the toolbar Paste button are both working for me to paste text into a text box. It is also working, for me, in bloom-desktop-beta 4.4.75. Hurray!

If you are using an earlier version of Bloom I would try to update your system. A developer can answer this better, but I seem to recall that a few months ago Ubuntu/Wasta 18.04 had a wider problem with these ctrl+ keys; I had the same issue in FLEx. Maybe that has been fixed now?

9

Thanks for the reply. I am using Wasta 18.04 and have both the latest Bloom and Bloom beta release. I’ve tried it today, and now copy/paste works! Yesterday, it didn’t. The toolbar buttons were greyed out too. There still seems to be a little stunted response in text boxes in general, like when you click, sometimes the cursor is there, sometimes not; or when you click the gear icon, it only opens up the text box options sometimes, or with a long delay. Nevertheless, the copy/paste is working today so I’m gonna get busy now before it stops again and I have to manually type Khmer to make a set of shell books. Thanks Liz and Kim for replying.

Ian