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Originally Posted by mrmikel
It isn't Gates haters per se.
Word has never worked the way I want to work. I like Wordperfect, but the html it puts out is terrible.
I know enough html and css to be dangerous and Sigil would be a fine program for me to produce epubs from scratch. But that is me.
Word is just too powerful for probably 75% that use it, given what they want to do. And they don't want to be bothered to try to figure it out. Given how I feel about Word, I can sympathize. But only to a point.
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I was a Word-hater, some years back. I stuck with Wordperfect, determined to ride out the "scorched earth" thing, under the (mistaken) assumption that other people were like me, preferred being able to see the tags, etc. Well, we all know that wasn't the way it went.
I started using Word because my clients increasingly had it (this is when I was building hotels, not making books, so mid-late 90's, I'd guess). I constantly got angry over how "Word doesn't do what I want it to." Then I needed to do something--I forget what the hell it was--a big, long, tedious document of hundreds of pages, IIRC--in legal outline form, and I bit the bullet and took about 2 total hours of online tutorials at Microsoft. Inside of 10 minutes, I had my first "lightbulb" moment; inside of 30 minutes, you couldn't have torn me away from the tutorials; and inside of 2 hours, I had Word down pretty pat.
Once I understood several things, it was simplicity itself, and now I can make Word act
exactly as I like it. The basic concepts are simple: Word's built in styles are simply CSS. That's it. The Styles you see in the Styles panel output directly as CSS. And just like CSS, changing or editing or modifying a Style changes all the elements to which that style is applied. That's one concept.
The second is, Word has a simple hierarchy, just like HTML (which is what it is, actually); a letter inside a word, inside a sentence, inside a paragraph, inside a section, inside a document. That's it. If you use header styles, you can create incredibly useful outlines that a) create Document Maps, b) are hierarchical, just like the h1-h6 headers in an ePUB/Sigil, c) can be used in Outline View, so you can see your entire document at once, or nearly at once, depending on length, d) allows you to drag-and-drop entire sections in your book/document; e) re-arrange major sections, create sub-sections, and the like. Oh, and automatically create TOC's, both with/without numbers. With the click of a button.
Want a simple bit of knowledge?
The closing paragraph tag carries all the formatting for the paragraph it closes. You don't see opening tags. If you delete the lagging pilcrow (closing para tag), you delete that paragraph's formatting. That's why using the backspace key rampantly can produce such unexpected results.
There mayn't be any printed manuals for Word, but there are scads of excellent how-tos and toots all over the Web. In my opinion, this guy has some of the best:
http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm . However, he expects you to actually read it. (That wasn't sarcasm; my experience with my clients is, ironically, that reading any "tecchie" instructions is not their bag. I expect that this is
not true of most MR'ers.)
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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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Absolutely. And name your styles to match your CSS. That's where it starts to get uber-simple.
There aren't any "instructions" on how to output "clean" HTML. The trick is, don't cruft it up in the first place. Use only very limited inline styles (italic, bold, underscore). Use named styles for all paragraph types, and all header types. Don't use "ad hoc" styles--in other words, don't type a paragraph, then decide to create a blockquote, and use the tab key to do it. Create a blockquote or indented-para style, and
apply it to the paragraph in question. Honestly, once you
see it, you'll see it. It makes life dramatically easier, in so many ways it's hard to describe them all.
Hitch