Thread: Is it possible to apply CSS to Sigil generated TOC?
View Single Post
Old 10-26-2013, 08:29 PM   #19
Tex2002ans
Wizard
Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Tex2002ans ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 2,306
Karma: 13057279
Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo Forma, Nook
Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat View Post
Indeed. So you design from the outset with this in mind, and make the cutoff point as low as possible. The job is to convey the information, not to play with the latest-and-greatest toys!
A lot of material out there was not designed initially for EPUB:
  • It was designed for print
    • Complex layouts
  • The book could have been created before format X, Y, or Z even existed.
  • The book/document could have been designed in an old/obsolete program.
  • It was designed as HTML on a website.
    • You could have decades of information ripe for an ebook.
      • Example: I am currently working on a project of ~15 years of daily economics articles.
  • Blog posts
    • This is the perfect example of first priority getting the information on your website, secondary/tertiary (or not even on the radar) priority is ebook.
    • These could have potentially been made to take advantage of the more advanced CSS capabilities in Firefox/Chrome/IE...

EPUB2 is not the tip-top priority and the be-all-end-all output format for every single book out there. And to be honest, compared to some of the great stuff you can do with CSS, the CSS capabilities of ADE are SEVERELY lacking.

In the case of the original poster, CSS counters have worked well for all of these years with new revisions of the guides... in every other format the company needs (I assume PDF/HTML at least). The tool they use allows them to easily add/remove questions as needed, and everything gets auto-renumbered in less than a second. Once you start hard-coding, you can't go back.

You would not toss out an entire workflow + YEARS of manhours.... just to maybe appease the quirks of having to hard-code numbers into a temporary ebook format (in this case EPUB2) or the quirks of an optional tool (in this case, Sigil).

There is such a thing as momentum of backlogs and in-place workflows.......... sure, you can easily say "just design from the outset with this in mind", but that is in many cases not possible (or more importantly, would be cost-prohibitive).

Quote:
Originally Posted by exaltedwombat View Post
Indeed. So you design from the outset with this in mind, and make the cutoff point as low as possible. The job is to convey the information, not to play with the latest-and-greatest toys!
You can stick with your "Cybook Gen 1" (*insert any old ereader*) reading pure .txt documents. Ok ok, I will grant you bold/italics. Any more than that would be too advanced for books! Can't go playing with the latest-and-greatest!
Tex2002ans is offline   Reply With Quote