Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat
So, if starting from scratch, why Word-and-convert? Word encourages you to lay out pages in ways an eBook can't handle. Atlantis, at first glance, seems a good idea. If I understand it correctly, it only allows constructs that translate well to epub, and produces effecient code.
Or just code directly into Sigil. Once authors stopped being scared by <h1> and <p> tags, they'd probably find them no obstacle to their creative flow! |
Honestly, EW:
The whole "Word is evil" thing is just so five-minutes-ago. I've tried AWP, I've used OO, and the bottom line is none of them output significantly cleaner code than the others. I've seen what Pages outputs (zoiks!), along with every other magic tool in the box, ranging from Jutoh to epub2writer to you-name-it. Cleaning HTML is pretty much just cleaning html. Word doesn't really "encourage" people to layout pages in ways that ebooks can't handle; programs like Publisher do, or Powerpoint, but it can still be done. OO and LO are just Word dressed differently; Wordperfect's export-to-HTML isn't any better.
The sole difference is, what HTML do you want to clean up? Do you want to clean up spans or Divs? Spans for italics or fonts for italics? Clean up Word's 1900 lines of cruft pretending to be internal CSS, or spend 20 minutes cleaning up Word first, and then output what can be very clean HTML?
The problem isn't the program. It's what the authors are accustomed to seeing. I still get manuscripts in here that, so help me, have the running headers and footers typed by HAND. I get books that--not making this up, are typed like this:
Code:
The quick brown fox jumped over <return><return>
The lazy dog.<return><return>
Next line of manuscript.
Because folks don't know that Word, or ANY word-processor, word-wraps, so they type to the right "margin" and then hit "enter" twice to create "double-spacing" for manuscripts. Whatcha gonna do? If people won't read the instructions for something as simple as a word-processor, I don't really think it makes a rats' butt worth of difference whether they use AWP, OO, LO, Word, WPerf or Bob's Big Word Processor. The only people who really care about whether or not AWP puts out html that is one iota cleaner than Word (assuming arguendo that it is) are nerds and wonks like us. Not authors. If they buy something, it's likely to be Scrivener, or LSBXE, or that ilk. Not AWP, IMHO.
FWIW.
Hitch