Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
Dammit Hitch, now you're making me feel bad for doing my own. I haven't got any special characters, so it's a really simple Word doc with just a handful of styles though.
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Lemurion:
I have zero issues with authors who learn how to, and do, format their own books. I do have issues with companies who claim to be US-based, owned and operated which are not, and which outsource all their work. That gets up my nose, because there are clients who do want to buy on-shore, for their own reasons. And, obviously, those of us who use NA (North American) based coders for books can't compete with the 3rd-worlders. {shrug}. Just can't.
Vis-a-vis the discussion about all the embedded spans:
That is one of 3 kinds of uncleaned output: 1) Word, direct to HTML, filtered, without any subsequent cleaning, but, more likely, is: 2) AbbyyFineReader output, direct to Word-->HTML or HTML, w/o any subsequent cleaning, or, god help us, 3) InDesign, with character style overrides, w/o any subsequent HTML and CSS cleaning. That's when you'll see that. You won't see that type of ridiculous, embedded spans, and ridiculous embedded EMPTY spans in any type of hand-crafted output. And certainly not from anyone that runs a company like mine.
You will see that moderately often (no offense, Lemurion) in SW output, due to 1) above. You will see that a LOT in any type of backlist content that has been outsourced to India for scanning/OCR, due to 2). Oh, and, I nearly forgot!!! The biggie for that type of output? The godawful, take a PDF into Adobe Acrobat Pro any version (X or XI or whatever) and "export to Word." Outputs THE WORST Word files, under the skin, I've ever seen. Absolutely hideous. You actually do better using AbbyFineReader's free online OCR tool that runs in a web-browser. I kid thee not.
With regard to our books: we use a HOUSE CSS sheet that has everything but the kitchen sink in it, but what we use in the book is whatever the minimum that is required to get the job done, excluding, of course, the ridiculous extra blank spans that we have to throw in to get iBooks to work with text-alignment and other idiocies like that. My only disagreement with my One Twoo Wuv, Ducky, is that we don't use span classes for italics and bold; we use inline HTML em and strong.
Hitch