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Old 08-07-2013, 08:57 AM   #8
DiapDealer
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Quote:
Originally Posted by ibu View Post
I understand all your arguments about "not important enough".
My hope was, that in the community of epub friends, there are many others who are looking for ways to clean existing epubs, because it is not rare, that cluttered source code is the cause of many presentation problems.
I don't mean to squash your hope completely. Someone may be working on something like that now. Or you may be able to convince someone that's it's worthwhile to develop something that does what you wish. It would be nice.

But in my experience (if I'm 100% honest): "cluttered" source code is rarely the cause of true presentation problems. The problem is that a very small subset of readers/hobbyists are extremely picky about the way they like their books presented on their particular device(s). So they make the effort to learn how to tweak the epub to meet their expectations (I'm one of these people). Convoluted and messy code makes it harder to see what needs to be done to accomplish your goals, but it's still not impossible.

The intersection of the group of people who want to change how the epub is presented, and the group who recognize messy code, but don't already have the skills necessary to fix it, has to be pretty darn small. And even then... I believe "clean" code is mostly just more aesthetically pleasing than anything. "Cluttered markup" can display just as well as clean mark up can.

So don't give up hope! Surely anybody who sees the value of clean markup and efficient css can't be above learning a scripting language to help achieve that goal?

Quote:
Originally Posted by ibu View Post
But I don't want to unzip an epub, edit all the files in Dreamweaver, pack it again as an epub, and than, perform the rest of cleaning inside Sigil (generate the TOC, edit the OPF, ...).
Sounds like the "Open With" feature of Sigil might be helpful to you. It will allow you to use external editors on files within the epub without all the unzip/rezip nonsense.
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