Welcome to the forum, John!
If you are working on Windows OS (you did mention "frozen screens"
), the Atlantis word processor is inexpensive, has good support, and does a good job of exporting a basic epub from Word docs or rtfs, suitable for tweaking with sigil.
http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/
Another, multi-platform, solution is OpenOffice.org with the "writer2epub" extension, which will also create a basic epub suitable for tweaking in sigil. It will also (IMHO) create much cleaner .xhtml files than does MS Word, in case you want to go that route.
http://www.openoffice.org/ for the software, and see the following forum on MoblieRead for discussion of the writer2epub extension.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=230
On a more subjective note, I am puzzled by your statement that
Quote:
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I know epub won't present as well as the PDF ebook.
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In my experience, PDF's are much more difficult to read on a reading device, or especially on a smartphone or PDA, because they do not reflow. They are great for presenting the exact appearance of the printed page on screen, but that's not what you want on an ebook reading device. I wonder if you have been trying to use calibre to convert PDFs to epubs. If so, that's bound to be frustrating. PDF is hands-down the worst choice as starting material for conversion to epub.
Your typesetting experience naturally leads you to think in terms of printed pages. That concept won't work for ebooks. Loosely speaking, there is no concept of "page" in that sense, because various devices have different screen sizes, adjustable type sizes, etc. The document has to re-flow to fit the screen, because you can't know in advance what device it's going to be displayed on.
Others can probably explain it better.