Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
No! Don't ever run your eBook through Word. Word just makes a horrible mess of things.
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Wolfie:
You know I love ya better than my luggage*, but, laddie, the vast, and I mean,
VAST, majority of today's books are written in Word. We export html out of Word daily, in large quantities, and somehow, we manage to survive it. You can approach this one of two ways: either kicking and screaming and making a crapload more work for yourself, for no reason, or adopt a calm acceptance of the fact, and learn to work
WITH Word, instead of against it. Once you actually take a few hours to learn Word's ins and outs, it's a mighty powerful tool. Once you accept and understand that Word is nothing more than a GUI interface to HTML, with a little extra "sumpin-sumpin" thrown in that can make you a bit whacko, it's easy to manipulate.
Very simply: use Word's built-in styles, which you modify to suit yourself, as psuedo-CSS. Clean the Word file (I can recommend either BookCreator's macros or Toxaris' spiffy Transform HTML macro). When I was still making books instead of being stuck in the office all the time, I would use BC's macro to clean a Word file stem-to-stern, then use Toxie's macro to ouput it, name the ss in Toxie's macro, and I'd have on damn spic-and-span file. This takes almost no time, compared to the Kicking and Screaming ("The Linda Blair") method. Is it perfect? No, but quite bluntly, neither is anything else that gets touted around here; the OO export sucks, the Atlantis ePUB-maker isn't any good (IMHO), Jutoh is okay, but it's not a production tool, etc.
For the love of heaven, don't Linda Blair it. Just embrace the Styles, kiddo. It will make your life SOOOOOOOOOOOO much easier.
*From "Steel Magnolias."
Hitch