Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
So would the best way to start in Word be to create a default document that has just the styles that might be used?
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Yeah, that's basically what I do when formatting an author's .docx or .rtf into an epub (say, for an ARC). My experience has been that authors (and editors) don't concern themselves with what I'd term typographical or semantic markup in their Word docs. For example, if by default a paragraph does not indent the first line, they will not change the style. They will add a tab, sometimes, or a space or two and then a tab, and so on. They are depending on the concept of WYSIWYG, literally, and they do what they think they need to do to hammer the styling into shape.
My job is to turn WYSIWYG into "What You See is What You MEANT," in some consistent way. That means imposing, at my discression, pre-defined "house" styles and absolutely NO "direct formatting" as Libre Office calls it, or "overrides" as ID calls it. Upon export to epub, this results in very clean xhtml, which can be easily tweaked with Sigil.
No freakin' worries, once the source is cleaned up as above.
This also applies when importing said .doc into InDesign, which is further tweaked by me and my boss, who is the final say as to print book interior design. That final ID file (after edits, proofreeding, and further edits, etc.) is exported as the basis for the print book, and the final epub, which is used for the basis for the final Kindle, and so on.
My point being, the average highly creative and talented author is not likely to concern her/himself with details of semantic document design. Nor, I dare say, should they be. That is for us drones to provide. Usuallly, for a fee (that someone, somewhere has to pay).
Just my two cents...
Albert