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Originally Posted by Hitch
@ExaltedWombat:
Meh. I rather like font embedding. I concur that it has the obvious drawbacks, but there is still pleasure in looking at what is clearly a carefully-crafted book--and that includes fonts, and sometimes illustrations. One need only look at Jellby's lovely work to appreciate that eBooks don't have to look like word-processed documents.
With regard to the "the conventional workflow of importing to Word, then to HTML, then to Sigil," I don't know anyone who imports TO Word, then on from there, but most of us, of course, receive our files in Word, or some word-equivalent. If you have a macro, like Toxaris', for exporting relatively clean HTML from Word, or, if like most of my shop, you have built in regex-clips in NoteTabPro, that are looking for certain standard Word cruft, and removing same, it's a 10-minute procedure. Are you suggesting starting off with the text inside Sigil? Using it like, say, Jutoh?
I agree, though, that we, too, spend some time tarting up perfectly good books so that a client can see precisely what they want--and this is almost 100% of the time for a client with an iPad, using iBooks as their reader. The other issue, of course, are those that use ADE but still can't wrap their heads around reflowability ("Can you please move that line up to the 'next page?'" type requests), but that's an issue of client education, which I personally find exhausting. Hell, I wrote an 80-page "ebook fundamentals" sort of thing, laying out all the "sorta basics" (ebooks don't have pages, running headers/footers, yadda), but I can't get them to read it,  , naturally. Heck, I even used boatloads of pics, too! |
Don't you find the more "careful crafting" you do, the less portable the eBook becomes? :-)
Maybe I'm unusual. I get a lot of my work from a publisher, who will already have worked with the author designing a printed edition. The original Word file is a distant memory - I'm working from the final "approved" proof, usually a PDF, sometimes an InDesign file (and if you think you've seen messy code from Word, check out what InDesign's Export as EPUB function spouts out - that's when it doesn't give up and freeze the computer :-) It really is often quicker to drop the whole mess into Notepad to strip all formatting, then relay the text from scratch in Sigil.
It's a long time since I've had a good straightforward story to work on. Obscure local histories, "I can fix the recession" manuals and a whole LOT of alternative therapy hokum dominate at present.
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Hell, I wrote an 80-page "ebook fundamentals" sort of thing,
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Maybe if you'd written a 2-page one...? :-)