I would say that, in all likelihood, 95% of what Albert and I (I = "we" at my company) do is identical. The process is the process. There's just no silver bullet. God knows, I wish there were. But as long as we have individual authors using "hook or crook" to get manuscripts to do what they think they want it to look like, we'll have different ad hoc styling (inline styling) problems to solve. I don't have the luxury that my buddy Albert has--no editors to help look for that type of garbage--so that's why we get the "more egregious" cases.
Here is an ACTUAL sample of what we deal with; I have a woman that's been emailing me for the last 6-12 months. She had a book in print, in Europe, as she is. She had a "friend" do the scanning of the print book, in France. The resulting scan had all the usual horrors--page numbers midst-page, section breaks, varying margins, columns set (yes), you-name-it. She couldn't even begin to work on it. The friend didn't use Abbyy; used a desktop scanner and some type of older scanning software.
I took pity on her (yes: I'm an idiot) and cleaned it up a bit, doing nothing more than tagging the italics and bold, removing the 5 gajillion styles, conforming the fonts, margins and other settings, removing all the section breaks. However, it had a ZILLION broken paragraphs, which of course she never saw. When I fixed the margins, she could of course now see them (doesn't know from a pilcrow). I'd sent it back to her for proofing, and for fixing the broken paras. Here is, I s**t thee not, text from an actual email from LAST NIGHT, after I painstakingly took screenshots, sent her links to a tutorial, etc., about cleaning up the broken paragraphs:
Quote:
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I've just looked and took the first few pages, the Prologue, and justified the margins. This corrects most of the broken paragraphs in one move. I'll do it chapter by chapter as I go.
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As I've said: you can't make this stuff up. Not visible to the eye, so, it's fixed, right? This is a lovely person, but....It's just not possible to force the horse to drink the water. YOU may see benefits, but until an author sees a DIRECT benefit to him or herself, and the software makes his or her life EASIER...well.
Hitch