[skreutzer]

Originally Posted by Hitch

I think, to speak to solely one thing, you missed the funny in my telling of the lady's reply about the broken paragraphs; when she said "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," she wasn't actually setting margins, as the goal; she thought she was FIXING broken paragraphs, because the ragged line endings she could "see" with her naked eyes magically moved to the right margin (when she chose "justified"). I'd been trying to get her to fix the pilcrows (paragraph codes) appearing mid-sentence and mid-paragraph that is the inevitable output of AbbyyFineREader

THAT was the funny. Not the typographic aspects. That would have to be fixed (broken paras) whether in markup, markdown, Word, OO, Latex or Bob's Big ePUB-Baker. ;-)

Oh, I think I understood it correctly: the adjustment of the visual appearance seemed to fix the mid-sentence and mid-paragraph problems, while indeed those problems remained in the document. My response might have been unprecise or misleading, because I also consider this as part of the issue of combining typesetting with writing. From the perspective of typesetting, the result after the adjustment looks visually OK, from the writing perspective, the text is corrupted by a lot of stuff that's not supposed to be there, which breaks the usability for any other target format than directly printing the visually adjusted Microsoft Word file via PDF. I just confused changing the margin with setting the paragraphs to "justified", but both would only be a visual adjustment. Two ways to solve it: visually show the pilcrows and fix them manually or prevent them from getting inserted into the text in the first place.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

There are more, like yWriter and Scrivener. They free to use, but not open source. Then again, they would not work for you anyway, since they have either been compiled for Mac and/or Windows.

You are correct. If they were freely licensed and wouldn't depend on proprietary programming libraries, binaries for free operating systems could be compiled. However, even if the output of yWriter and Scrivener could be usable for automated processing workflows, for myself and others I need a free writing program with semantic markup support, because otherwise it would require a proprietary application in order to be able to benefit from the freely licensed processing workflow tools, a dependency which I have to avoid.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

As I have said multiple times, the DOCX format is not secretative or proprietary. It is a well documented open format. It is the OOXML (Office Open XML) and been accepted as an open standard in 2006 by ECMA and in 2008 by ISO.

You should read this: http://web.archive.org/web/201311270...XML_objections - Microsoft is very known to specify formats, which are documented publicly, but contain "features" which make it hard to implement by artificial obstacles for the sole purpose of protectionism. Since there's also a better open specification to do the same thing (ODT), DOCX should be considered proprietary, because otherwise it would look more like ODT.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

The reason I created this, is that I want another type of output not suited for a wordprocessor. Actually, a lot of information very relevant to a wordprocessor is thrown out the window since it has no use in an e-book. So, that is not a good output for a wordprocessor.
Without a doubt someone can come up with a document that my add-in chokes upon. I am always looking for documents that can actually that, since it helps me to improve the process. Still, the add-in was initially created to help my own process and for some others. That grew to support more, but in the end I still make the decisions. I can say that if I do not longer support the add-in, it will be open-source. Untill then, I keep it closed source for various reasons.

I agree completely, but again, don't think that publishing the source code (which is far from actual free licensing) wouldn't change much, except that it could improve the security of your users and encourage custom adjustments (without collaboration on improvements).

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Yet none have been set up for Calligra Suite and Abiword, which is usually an indicator that building these software products is not a trivial matter, even for programmers.

Indeed! Still, if somebody at some time gets it done, he can provide a how-to or package binaries for users who trust him. For instance, I can't build Sigil on my system because I can't figure out the cause of a build problem. I just don't know the reason for it, if I would know, I probably could fix it myself. So all that's missing is more or less a hint how to solve it, and if I could solve it, I could help other people who have problems which I up to know had already solved myself. So it's more a question of a broad user base, popularity, for such things to become common for an application.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

Programmers who claim to provide free software, which actually only 10% of end users can use, are effectively discriminating against 90% of all other users. Saying that the other 90% are free to build the software themselves is akin to saying that millionaires are free to sleep under bridges.

No. The 90% chose to use systems for which it is impossible to develop free software, so I don't see a reason why free software developers should waste time for making proprietary operating systems look more attractive, which is the exact opposite of what free software developers try to achieve with their program in the first place.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

If you want to provide a useful software product that helps both authors and ebook producers, you'll have to get off your high horse and drop your very unproductive holier-than-thou attitude, because it'll get you nowhere.

I don't mind if you think of me like this, but I wonder how you can think that the concept of free software could be "unproductive" and get me "nowhere". In general, there can't be any doubt that such impression is false, and for this specific case, I've already proofed that I can implement the backend, and I'm at the moment working on generalizing it, so the missing front-end is the topic of this thread - even if I do nothing more on the topic, for myself the LibreOffice XHTML output is quite sufficient, but I'm looking for a solution which also other people could use, which I could give to them in order to write in that application initially or later copy the plain text into it in order to do the semantic markup with it.