Hi, Valloric, all:
I've now used Sigil on some 30-odd books, give or take, with good, solid results. However, the last two books I've done, both having been sent to me from Word files, have had bizarre problems that I thought I'd share here.
In both instances, I went through the files in NoteTab after converting Word->html. I stripped everything I could find, leaving only <p> tags and some <i> hither and yon. Apparently, a few old MS <spans> slipped by me, and this seems to have caused major disasters.
In both instances, after I put the files into Sigil, and they looked fine, for some inexplicable reason, Sigil inserted sgc-X styles into EVERY, and I mean
EVERY, paragraph, completely overriding the included external ss and changing the fonts and the font size, usually to match a vestigial span laying about somewhere in the manuscript.
I didn't catch it, visually, the first time it happened (I was rushing to get a proof copy out to a good client), and she emailed me in a swivet, because the book was such a disaster. I opened it and looked at it, and what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a book with differing fonts appearing out of literally nowhere, so that instead of TNR 12, I would have 11 for half a paragraph, and then back to 12. Or an entire para would be 11 now, instead of the 12 it should have been when it only had <p> tags. I fixed that one by going through and S&R'ing all the damned sgc codes out, but I thought then that it had been caused by something weird that might have come through from its
initial origin, which was Adobe ID. (InDesign->RTF->Word->to me).
But then, I had a perfectly normal, plain Word file from another client, which I converted into html (same as I always do), then stripped it down, added noindent paras for new scenes, the usual. It rendered fine; I put it into Sigil; it looked perfectly good...and then, ka-blammo!, out of nowhere, the whole thing was restyled with sgc tags. Every plain old <p> was suddenly <p style="sgc-3">, which looked NOTHING like what I'd put in my ss. The ss was clearly used by the Sigil file (the title page proved that)...I ended up AGAIN going through and deleting all the "style="blahblah" text, and the Tidy cleaned up the spans that ALSO appeared out of nowhere.
It's
tres bizarre. I've pared down my stylesheet to the very bare essentials, so it's not that. I know that it's not helpful for me to post this here without the file, so next time it happens, I'll do a "save as" so you can see the result, BUT, I'm familiar enough with Sigil, and I've done enough books, where this is not normal behavior. I can't remember when the last update was, but this has only happened with the last two books. It seems to occur when Sigil encounters a piece of vestigial <span> code, leftover from Word, that sets a different font than that which was set for the <p> in the stylesheet...and for some odd reason, it creates an sgc class to match that span, which wouldn't be so bad, but it then assigns that newly-created sgc class to ALL paragraphs, which it should
not fracking do.
If anyone has had similar experience, or if, Valloric, you are familiar with this, I'd be grateful for some input on how to avoid this in the future. I mean, sure, I can go through and rip out all the sgc-X coding, but it's a bit annoying after I've hand-coded most of the html file to get rid of all the accursed MS coding. (I used to use BookDesigner's templates as an interim step, to strip all the formatting but leave the italics, but I still ended up having to strip all the "MsoNormal" coding from the <p>'s, and the stylesheet it generated was godawful. Thousands of lines of embedded fonts for no apparent reason and no way to prevent it.) Thank the heavens for NoteTab, which is "da bomb."
Anyway...sorry for the length, but it's confusing and frustrating, coming out of left field when I'd gotten this process down to a pretty smooth operation. If anyone has any insight, that would be
great.
Thanks,
Hitch