cleaning up a word document in Sigil

[BeccaPrice]

I have a MS Word 7 document that I want to put on my Sony. I saved the document as Filtered Web, and imported it into Sigil. When I looked at the code, parts of the code were in different colors. Can anyone tell me what the different colors represent? What of the codes that Word puts in can I safely delete, and what do I need to leave in?

also, my bulleted lists weren't imported cleanly (which I didn't expect they they would). I used the Remove Formatting command in Sigil to remove the formatting so I could use the Unordered Lists command in Sigil to make the list a bulleted list, but it changed the font as well. I'm not sure how to fix this.

I don't know much about HTML/XML or CSS. This is for a class project, and I'm afraid I may have bitten off more than I can easily cope with! so any help is greatly appreciated.

Becca,

Don't panic! Let's try to tackle these questions in order.

About the different colors: this is something that Sigil - and many other coding programs - do to help you keep track of which HTML tags are currently open and closed. The text that will appear on your final page will be displayed in black; anything colored indicates an HTML/CSS tag.

About markup from a Word document: Yeah, unfortunately Word tends to leave a lot of gibberish within a document if you try to import it into other programs. The tags you're seeing probably indicate what is the style of the font (bold, italic, etc.), what color it is, what font type it is using, and so on; but without seeing the document itself I'm afraid I can't help you much as to the specifics.

Is this a long document, though? You may find it's faster to just try to reproduce how it looks yourself in Sigil's "page view" editor, or (if you have a little more time, and think you might want to do this again in the future) try to dip your toes into the wild world of HTML/CSS code - it's not as hard as it looks! There are many good sites that can get you started; the walkthroughs on W3Schools.com are generally pretty decent, and this forum can certainly help you out as well.

Hope that helps!

[theducks]

Colors in code view are coding (and mis-codeing warnings )

Black is your text. (When IN THE BODY) It may required when in the Headers, best leave it unless you know what you are breaking
Blue are Tags
dark green comments (includes commented OUT text)
Gold is (local to the page) Style(?) SGC stuff and @page are inserted by Sigil

Red is tag attributes, the teal is the value to be passed

I may have missed some less common.

I think ducks has got all the main ones- there's also purple, which is used to indicate some special symbols (such as the & symbol), and non-dark green, which is used to highlight any quoted areas within tags (for instance, when you are linking to another page in the document).

[BeccaPrice]

december: I'm doing a technical documentation class project, and what I've chosen to document is ways to create epub and mobi files using Sigil and Calibre. My target document is fairly short, but has a lot of different formatting - I want to demonstrate how to do a paragraph with the first line indented, space between paragraphs, boxed paragraphs, various heading levels and things like that. I figured that the easiest way would be to start with a formatted Word document, and then clean up the HTML, but that may actually be harder than doing it natively in Sigil and then converting to mobi with Calibre. My target devices are the Kindle and the Sony 350 (mostly because that's what I have) but I also want to see how documents display on a smart phone.

[Pablo]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

december: I'm doing a technical documentation class project, and what I've chosen to document is ways to create epub and mobi files using Sigil and Calibre. My target document is fairly short, but has a lot of different formatting - I want to demonstrate how to do a paragraph with the first line indented, space between paragraphs, boxed paragraphs, various heading levels and things like that. I figured that the easiest way would be to start with a formatted Word document, and then clean up the HTML, but that may actually be harder than doing it natively in Sigil and then converting to mobi with Calibre. My target devices are the Kindle and the Sony 350 (mostly because that's what I have) but I also want to see how documents display on a smart phone.

Have a look at my tutorial (see my signature), you might find it useful.

Becca: Thanks for the clarification - just checking that this was a short document and not, say, a novel-length piece. That makes things easier!

Honestly, I would say your best bet is to code the thing by hand in Sigil - I hand-code and convert my .epub files to .mobi format all the time with Calibre and rarely run into any problems. With a bit of help from online HTML and CSS tutorials, you should be able to whip this up pretty quickly - Sigil's stylesheet file is your friend!

[BeccaPrice]

december: your document is wonderful - thank you!

I think you're right, that hand-coding in Sigil might be easiest. I do need to play more with Sigil's style sheets, and figure out how best to document them.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

december: your document is wonderful - thank you!

I think you're right, that hand-coding in Sigil might be easiest. I do need to play more with Sigil's style sheets, and figure out how best to document them.

Make them self documenting by including comments

.indented {
/* this will indent a left justified paragraph start by 2em*/
    text-align: lefy;
    text-indent: 2em;
    }

Ok this is a pretty lame example that should not really need further commenting

BTW keep the comments terse, the reader still has to parse the files. Bulk is Bulk

[sellew]

When starting from a Word document I often use two alternative roundabouts:
1. Opening the document in Atlantis Wordprocessor and using the "save as Epub" option.
2. Opening it in OpenOffice (or LibreOffice) and converting it to Epub by means of the add-on Writter2ePub (http://extensions.services.openoffic...ct/Writer2ePub)

In both cases you got an ePub already formatted and the code much more cleaner than the HTML you get directly from MS Word. Then you can fine-tune and customize it as you want with Sigil in a easier way.