Thread: Epub creation - pasting word and preserving codes
View Single Post
Old 03-01-2014, 03:54 AM   #11
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Hitch ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Hitch's Avatar
 
Posts: 11,503
Karma: 158448243
Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
Device: K2, iPad, KFire, PPW, Voyage, NookColor. 2 Droid, Oasis, Boox Note2
Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz View Post
That is absolutely positively not how you create an EPUB.

You are doing a tremendous amount of work, to get broken output, when very easy options are available that already work perfectly.

You create an EPUB by converting the document itself from .docx to EPUB. Either with calibre, or with Toxaris' Word Addon.
He seems to be trying to develop a "DIY" website (he said he developed a "site" along with a friend) somewhat like...Smashwords, I guess. Paste your Word file in here, and it comes out as an ePUB there. (It's the "ePUB-liarmuss" spell, again!)

Given that Smashwords, Calibre and NookPress all already do that (along with a bunch of others like Draft2Digital, etc.), I'm not sure I understand where this is going if it's intended to be commercial. Moreover, although I haven't tried it, I've been told that you can kinda do what you want by just running a Word file through Calibre. {shrug}.

This has the same issue that ALL conversions have: it's all great if the styling in Word or Word-equivalents is solid and simple. But if it isn't, and you have anything that you don't have in your stylesheet, well...that dog don't hunt. And all of us here already know that pasting BookView to BookView (essentially, from Word's WYSIWYG view to Sigil's Bookview)

Does. Not. Work.

And there's no "magic" way to extract the Word styles without exporting it to HTML in the first place. That's why almost all of the "convert your book to ePUB" websites use Calibre or the Calibre API. Because what you're trying to do, Mr. Pointy, doesn't work the way you want it to.

"Just" pasting a Word file into some interface and getting an ePUB out is the silly Holy Grail of every converter who has never actually done a boatload of books, because, trust me: books are like fingerprints. No two are the same, and the "paste" idea ONLY works (from HTML) if the whole book is cleaned FIRST. The same hour you'd need to do it correctly via HTML in the first place, just to get to the basic HTML in an ePUB. So: why even bother with it? Why not just clean the HTML? ($5 to doughnuts to you, dearest Tox, if I haven't already guessed the answer...)

Hitch
Hitch is offline   Reply With Quote