Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Steve:
For example, I stupidly (I've told this story here before) once agreed to take on and "fix" an ePUB that was purportedly completed, to rebuild into a MOBI. Some 66 spans later, named sequentially, "char-override style 1" through "char-override-style-66," I regretted it enormously. Or spans to achieve a font size (e.g., font-size 80%, or some such) instead of a named class. Once someone gets in the habit of "on the fly" styling spans, it's really no different than the ad hoc styling that we all get to see far too often from ill-created Word files, or worse, the output from something like Adobe Acrobat Pro to an "exported Word file," which is usually pretty catastrophic. ;-)
Hitch
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Hi Hitch,
As long as I have your ear, I need your opinion. I'm writing my ePubs in Xhtml, with Bluefish. I write the whole book as one Xhtml file, and then my converter (which isn't yet complete) splits it into files, making Manifest, Spine, NCX, and Guide as necessary entries for each page. The converter has a YAML config file that defines relationship between <h?> and Part, Chapter, Section, etc, and which levels get their own page. I typically page break on Part and Chapter, but it's configurable.
Here's my question: Some non-hierarchical entities, such as Acknowledgements, Apendix, etc, need their own pages, so there needs to be a way, in the full book Xhtml source, to indicate a new page. I *could* make things like the appendix title an <h?> tag of a special class indicating it's not in the hierarchy and therefore don't call it "Chapter" and don't increment the Chapter number, but for various reasons, that would be messy.
What I was thinking of was having a <div class=pagebreak/>, which would tell the converter to break here, without implying this is a Part, chapter, etc. In the multichapter source file it would look like a bunch of dashes, but in the individual ePub Xhtml file it would look like nothing at all, with margins of 0, and would gain an id value of "toppage". Yeah, it's a kludge, but it's a darned convenient kludge, both for the book author, and for the guy who programs the converter (me in both cases).
What do you think?
Thanks,
SteveT