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Old 11-02-2010, 08:21 AM   #18
MrPLD
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Posts: 933
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Join Date: Sep 2010
Location: North Queensland, Australia
Device: Kindle 3 Wifi, Onyx Boox M96
Therein lies somewhat the crux of the issue. Using things like Word/OOo makes it highly likely that font/formatting quirks slip in by accident. The formats have an immense degree of complexity it's akin to using the space shuttle to hammer in a nail. The writer ends up having to spend a lot of time working on preening the formatting, something that shouldn't even need to be done if the original source is suitably chosen.

If one stays with a simpler core format (RTF, simplified-HTML, even plain text!) a lot of the troubles go away.

While I understand the choice of Word/OOo because of the ubiquitous nature and apparently there's some additional metadata that the MG uses (I'm not sure what), it's unfortunately leading a lot of writers to end up with less than satisfactory results.


My wife came to me asking today "My Kindle won't jump chapters like it used to!", turns out it's another poorly formatted eBook without an appropriate ToC, certainly not the first time.

I can appreciate that there are always going to be stylistic debates (nolines+indent vs no-indent + line break, and then how much does one indent, what about headings, etc etc) but right now I think the general standard is yet to get to the point where that's the main point of argument.

Paul.
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