[Hitch]

^^ What Toxaris said, firstly.

Originally Posted by skreutzer

Well, you're right, but only up to a certain point. I know that some writers prefer to shoot themselves in the foot. Without doubt, I wouldn't even try to convince them to get good output files, with less or no manual work to produce e-books and PDFs, because they really like bad output files, much manual work and crappy e-books as well as crappy print results. For all the other writers, in case of a word processor, I would bring up a setup wizard at first start of the program, inform the user why and how he has to use styles, let him define several styles, and then work on the text.

And, this is where you lost me. I've reviewed, analyzed, quoted, and discussed nearly 3-4,000 manuscripts over the past 5 years, mostly the last 4. Would you like me to tell you precisely--precisely--how many authors went back and cleaned up their manuscripts, after I gave them a) tutorials, b) manuals, c) good economic reasons to do it and d) detailed instructions, on items ranging from styles to broken paragraphs? Go ahead and ask me. Because I'll tell you, and here's a hint: the answer does not have two syllables. Out of ALL OF THOSE manuscripts, of which, over 90% needed some type of cleaning, styling, and of which, nearly 10% or more had myriad problematic broken paragraphs. (And don't get me STARTED on trying to get a clean, proofed manuscript from a publisher that's had a book scanned and OCR'ed!!!).

You are more than welcome to give this idea a go, but trust me when I tell you: given that there are dozens of word processors out there that can already do this, for all intents and purposes, why would the people who ALREADY won't do this, do it with yours?

In general, not much would be different, except you couldn't just select a font or a font size. Even if font selection (and similar GUI components) would persist, you could change the font, but would be asked which style you're currently editing or if you want to create a new style, or you would automatically change the font at all portions of the text which are marked with the style that is currently selected. So there would be little difference for the writer (additionally, I would assume a writer writes text, while you assume that a writer does typesetting).

No...you're assuming that the writer is going to format the text. You've just SAID so. An author sits there and decides that they want to create a "text message" style for text messages from his protagonist to someone else, so s/he hits the tab key. In your scenario, you're going to, at that moment, force them to make all these styling decisions, while they, to their minds, are in full artistic and creative flow? Uhhhhhhhhhh....trust me when I say, I can hear the screams now. Why not just have them use Jutoh, instead?

From the description of your add-in on the websites linked in your signature, it looks like you're throwing out all direct formatting, but retain semantic style markup. So I wonder why you don't agree that a word processor should encourage semantic style markup and disable direct formatting, since the latter is obviously useless for all other software except the word processor itself. To save the time of the author, who potentially spends time with direct formatting, he could do something useful instead by applying templates, which your add-in could retain.

Or, just use one of the nine bajillion free Word-for-print or Word-for-ebook templates that are already out there, like Guy Kawasaki's. You should try Tox's add-in before you make assumptions about it, it's pretty cool.

Also, if the output of your add-in should be used for e-book or print preparation (or as input for an automated processing workflow), the output file needs to be extended with semantic markup, using Sigil. So not only the time of the author is wasted, if he uses direct formatting, also the time of the Sigil person is wasted, who has to do the semantic markup afterwards completely from scratch (in the worst case). In an ideal workflow, the author would do semantic markup with style templates initially (everywhere where he would use direct formatting anyway), all of it would be retained by your add-in, and if some markup still would be missing for preparation of e-book and print creation, the Sigil person would add just the missing markup. The key thing here is that the direct formatting is useless for the writer and the preparation guy in any case (and therefore a waste of time and resources), so a word processor does a bad job by allowing direct formatting. The developer of the word processor just gets away with it, because the author will find out about the consequences when it is far too late, and then not blame the developer of the word processor, but the poor formatting guy, because the root of the problem is unknown to the author.

Yeah, but: you have this view that the author WANTS to know. Now, obviously, the authors I know are those that don't want to know, but you don't have to spend very many days on the KDP forums to find out that basically: they don't want to know. Hear this: they would rather use the dreaded Smashword's "nuclear method" (clear all formatting) than learn to use Styles. I say this, and I hold it to be true because in 5 years--FIVE--I've had ONE author ask me to teach him how to use Styles. ONE. Out of at least Three, more likely Four THOUSAND with whom I've corresponded in detail about their manuscripts. Work those odds.

Well, do you have any needs for your own projects? I'm mostly driven by my own personal need, currently just small "book" projects. But over time, I hope to provide more and more general purpose processing tools, which could be used by self-publishers or to set up an (online?) service. On the one hand, it's a lot of work and won't be sufficient for all kinds of uses within the first time, on the other hand if a solution is implemented once, a lot of texts can be processed with it. The problem to get good semantic XML will still need to be addressed, but that's exactly what I was wondering about if Sigil could be used for it (to let the author do the semantic markup of his text with Sigil if he failed to do it right in the first place, and then take the prepared EPUB (XHTML) file from Sigil as input for an automated processing system. But there are also alternative ways to get a semantic XML/XHTML file from the author, one could be to write a JavaScript based online/offline text editor for semantic editing. Currently, I write semantic XHTML myself as input for conversion to EPUB, but as OpenOffice (therefore LibreOffice too, I assume) is already capable of valid, semantic XHTML output, I should probably work on a way to educate the author (video tutorial), a website to provide this education, a list of style names to use in OpenOffice, an upload form for the author to submit OpenOffice XHTML output on the mentioned website, and a schema to check if the uploaded file matches the expected style names, so that the file then could be automatically be processed to EPUB, and later to PDF. I know how this description reads, but existing free software would provide short cuts, the development could be done collectively as free software, and over time the system would expand, so it could become a real option for self-publishers that would reduce manual labor for authors, formatters and developers. Maybe it would not be in the scope of the website, but depending on the interfaces, theoretically, somebody could from there distribute the prepared files directly to online e-book shops and print-on-demand services. As build as and with free software, that system would not be an online service by some provider, but could be set up by everybody online or offline. The free software license would make sure that every improvement is available to everybody else, so essentially a community would work together instead of competing against each other. I myself don't need necessarily such a large system, I'm glad to develop my own little system to use it for my book projects and maybe for people I work together with, and if it grows beyond that because my results are freely licensed, fine. In any case, I'm interested if somebody else does something similar with free software, and if there could be a joint effort to provide a common solution for a larger audience of people.

Nobody here, software-wise, is competing. All the products, software, etc., that have been discussed here, whether Calibre, Sigil, Tox's add-ins, add-ons or macros, etc., are all OS and donorware. That's it. But there's a realism factor, as well...maybe I am jaded. In fact, I'd bet money on it. I once really, really TRIED to get into XML-->XSLT and just couldn't get there from here, as previously discussed. if something comes along that authors will adopt, OR, allows me to easily convert/channel what authors REALLY do into XML, great. I'm all for it. I just don't...I don't FEEL it yet.

Hitch