Table of Contents: opf, mobi, prc - Page 2

JSWolf · 09-20-2012, 06:56 PM

No! Don't ever run your eBook through Word. Word just makes a horrible mess of things.

Hitch · 09-20-2012, 07:09 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JSWolf

No! Don't ever run your eBook through Word. Word just makes a horrible mess of things.

Wolfie:

You know I love ya better than my luggage*, but, laddie, the vast, and I mean, VAST, majority of today's books are written in Word. We export html out of Word daily, in large quantities, and somehow, we manage to survive it. You can approach this one of two ways: either kicking and screaming and making a crapload more work for yourself, for no reason, or adopt a calm acceptance of the fact, and learn to work WITH Word, instead of against it. Once you actually take a few hours to learn Word's ins and outs, it's a mighty powerful tool. Once you accept and understand that Word is nothing more than a GUI interface to HTML, with a little extra "sumpin-sumpin" thrown in that can make you a bit whacko, it's easy to manipulate.

Very simply: use Word's built-in styles, which you modify to suit yourself, as psuedo-CSS. Clean the Word file (I can recommend either BookCreator's macros or Toxaris' spiffy Transform HTML macro). When I was still making books instead of being stuck in the office all the time, I would use BC's macro to clean a Word file stem-to-stern, then use Toxie's macro to ouput it, name the ss in Toxie's macro, and I'd have on damn spic-and-span file. This takes almost no time, compared to the Kicking and Screaming ("The Linda Blair") method. Is it perfect? No, but quite bluntly, neither is anything else that gets touted around here; the OO export sucks, the Atlantis ePUB-maker isn't any good (IMHO), Jutoh is okay, but it's not a production tool, etc.

For the love of heaven, don't Linda Blair it. Just embrace the Styles, kiddo. It will make your life SOOOOOOOOOOOO much easier.

*From "Steel Magnolias."

Hitch

mncowboy · 09-24-2012, 08:36 AM

Word can work just fine. I create books with the word generated toc, linked endnotes, etc. and it works like a champ. I have found a couple things that need to be done though.
First, always use styles for everything.
Save as filtered web page.
In Sigil, delete all the lines in the style section of the html document.
Create a css file with all the styles that you used in the word document.
Link that style sheet in the html.
You are good to go!
I do some additional cleanup, like a search and replace to change <p class="MsoNormal"> to just <p>.

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09-20-2012, 06:56 PM	#16
JSWolf Resident Curmudgeon Posts: 73,954 Karma: 128903250 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: Roslindale, Massachusetts Device: Kobo Libra 2, Kobo Aura H2O, PRS-650, PRS-T1, nook STR, PW3	No! Don't ever run your eBook through Word. Word just makes a horrible mess of things.

09-24-2012, 08:36 AM	#18
mncowboy Wanderer Posts: 106 Karma: 472218 Join Date: Jan 2011 Device: Kindle 3, PaperWhite 2	Word can work just fine. I create books with the word generated toc, linked endnotes, etc. and it works like a champ. I have found a couple things that need to be done though. First, always use styles for everything. Save as filtered web page. In Sigil, delete all the lines in the style section of the html document. Create a css file with all the styles that you used in the word document. Link that style sheet in the html. You are good to go! I do some additional cleanup, like a search and replace to change <p class="MsoNormal"> to just <p>.