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Old 01-13-2014, 11:41 AM   #44
st_albert
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st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'st_albert gives new meaning to the word 'superlative.'
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by skreutzer View Post
You don't have to answer if you don't like, but with the experience and the working environment you're in, I would indeed consider some hints about it valuable.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, I'll briefly share my experience.

I work for a small-press "traditional" publisher, publishing in both print and e-book (usually both for a given title, but sometimes only one or the other). Typically our authors supply manuscripts as Word documents, and they are unaware of the proper use of styles. They do, however, often have a definite idea of how they want their manuscript typeset, and as you would expect in a WYSIWYG enviornment, they achieve the desired results by hook or crook. For example, one passage is poetry, indented with tabs; another is a blockquote; and a third is supposed to be a letter, so it's in a script font. Paragraph indentation is achieved via tabs and/or spaces. Vertical spacing is done with empty paragraphs. There may or may not be page breaks at the end of chapters.

Once a manuscript is accepted, a manuscript passes through one or more editors, and back and forth to the author and publisher, until it is finally ready for prime time. Everyone uses Word and its native format.

Wouldn't it be wonderful if they all used a collaborative, web-based process?

Not. Going. To. Happen.

Once the manuscript has seen edits, it comes to me. My goal is to "clean it up" by replacing the direct formatting and hook-or-crook styling with a uniform standardized set of paragraph and character House styles, while preserving the intent of the author's formatting in so far as possible.

If the book is destined for print, I pull it into InDesign, and do the cleanup there. If there won't be a print version, or if we need a quick ebook as an ARC, I use LibreOffice, save as an .odt file and export that to epub via Writer2xhtml.

The actual cleanup issues were well described by Hitch, though we don't get some of the more egregious cases -- manuscripts like that would never be accepted in the first place. Some things can be handled automatically: removing whitespace at the beginning of a paragraph, replacing direct formatting (e.g. italics, bold) with the appropriate character style, imposing house styles in place of whatever styles the author did or didn't use (usually the "defalult" style).

Treatment of chapter headers, styling the first paragraph, and some other idiosyncratic details, however, require case-by-case intervention. Sometimes you just have to look at it to decide what the author was trying to do.

After epub export from either InDesign or LibreOffice, it goes to Sigil for chapter splitting, adding the cover, adding lots of metadata to the .opf file, and generation of TOC's (typically both an .ncx and an inline TOC.xhtml). A modified version is also prepared for use with kindlegen to make the Amazon Kindle version.

Going forward, we use the InDesign file (if there is one) as the master file to collect all of the inevitable corrections that only magically appear after the book is in print, and when necessary generate updated ebooks from it.

HTH
Albert
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