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John123 · 02-02-2011, 08:27 AM

Hi All,

I am complete newbie to this forum, so please be gentle

I am a typesetter using very obscure typesetting software. I have tried using InDesign/Quark but my background is, initially, hot metal compositor then code driven phototypesetting machines from the very early '80s and all flavours of book production in between.

Going by the publishers I deal with, it would seem now that epub has it's nose out in front, when it comes to the many reading devices available for ebooks. I have been doing ebooks in PDF format for a few years now. But there seems to be a lot of issues with Calibre. I know epub won't present as well as the PDF ebook. But there must be some way of producing a well-presented ebook without a huge amount of effort.

I can't find any commercial software that will produce an epub ebook simply. Sigil seems to be the only program that takes care of producing an epub ebook with any sort of efficiency.

I am using an editor/typesetting program which has fairly powerful search and replace routines and would like to keep using it. However, on cutting and pasting (importing a txt file drops the hard returns??), into Sigil it doesn't use the HTML tags I've inserted. Viewing the epub file in Adobe Digital Editions doesn't use the tags either. However, when I view the file on a reading device, in my case an iPhone, the codes seem to work.

Any help would be most appreciated and apologies for the lengthy preamble.

Many thanks in advance.

John.

02-02-2011, 08:27 AM	#1
John123 Connoisseur Posts: 82 Karma: 73150 Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: Scottish Highlands Device: Samsung Note, Kindle, hudl2	Using Sigil to produce ebooks Hi All, I am complete newbie to this forum, so please be gentle I am a typesetter using very obscure typesetting software. I have tried using InDesign/Quark but my background is, initially, hot metal compositor then code driven phototypesetting machines from the very early '80s and all flavours of book production in between. Going by the publishers I deal with, it would seem now that epub has it's nose out in front, when it comes to the many reading devices available for ebooks. I have been doing ebooks in PDF format for a few years now. But there seems to be a lot of issues with Calibre. I know epub won't present as well as the PDF ebook. But there must be some way of producing a well-presented ebook without a huge amount of effort. I can't find any commercial software that will produce an epub ebook simply. Sigil seems to be the only program that takes care of producing an epub ebook with any sort of efficiency. I am using an editor/typesetting program which has fairly powerful search and replace routines and would like to keep using it. However, on cutting and pasting (importing a txt file drops the hard returns??), into Sigil it doesn't use the HTML tags I've inserted. Viewing the epub file in Adobe Digital Editions doesn't use the tags either. However, when I view the file on a reading device, in my case an iPhone, the codes seem to work. Any help would be most appreciated and apologies for the lengthy preamble. Many thanks in advance. John.