Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
The problem is though that you cannot do some things that were done in the hand crafted version via the meatgrinder. Can you have different fonts via the meatgrinder like say serif, sans-serif, & monosapce? I think Sunborn lends itself to font changes very nicely.
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The Meatgrinder allows serif, sans serif & monospace. I don't think it allows embedded fonts, but it allows other ones, which will only work right if the receiving machine has them.
It *doesn't* allow tables of any sort (presumably, because auto-conversion from Word would be nightmarish), nor drop-caps or other css-related functions that aren't supported in .pdb and .mobi formats. Hand-coded .epubs can be a lot more complicated (and elegant) than the Meatgrinder can produce--but the number of authors willing to learn to hand-code is much, much lower than the number willing to follow a style guide.
Following the style guide produces decent .epub files, equivalent in quality to pulp mass-market paperbacks. Nothing fancy, but nice readable text. *Kinda-sorta* following the style guide, or ignoring it, produces mediocre to lousy .epub files.
While I'd love to see SW upgrade the Meatgrinder to allow more versatility, and/or allow author-submitted ebook formats, I'd rather they spent their time fixing the search engine, allowing sorting by price, changing the personal library so it's not one long chronological list, and so on.
The Meatgrinder works acceptably well for the vast majority of readers; if you don't like it, you are, of course, free not to get books from Smashwords.