Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
This. ^^
And thus the need to either use Toxaaris' addon or calibre as an intermediate step, or else to duplicate all that work yourself by creating Yet Another Conversion Tool, with a great deal of backend programming to handle it.
If you truly wish to write that program, don't let us stop you, but if you just wish to take Word documents and put the contents into Sigil, why not go with the already existing tools?
What is the problem with "bounce(ing) it through calibre or sigil first", and why is using a web-based program going to be any better?
For that matter, I am sure you can whip up a php script to upload a word document and have the server run calibre to convert it, then offer up the results to you. Why that would be any better, I do not know.
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eschwartz:
He's already told us. He's trying to create some type of auto-convert website, so that users can paste a Word file into a box, and out pops an ePUB. Something like...NookPress, essentially. He doesn't want human intervention on his part, as near as I can discern, or he'd just have them UPLOAD the files, extract the html and then feed them to Sigil/Calibre/whatever.
{shrug}. Yes, wouldn't THAT be nice. Of course, the nearly hilarious part of this (no offense to Mr. Pointy) is that this is exactly how good books go badly wrong;
the operating assumption that the bloody file is clean to begin with. I may just be remarkably unlucky, but let me be perfectly clear about this:
I do not see ONE clean or remotely formatted Word file out of 100. Seriously. Possibly not one out of 200. This idea suffers from the same as many of the "auto-magic converters" out there; once someone has DONE all the work of cleaning and formatting their manuscript, following someone's instructions, there's no reason on God's green earth why they wouldn't just upload the result to NookPress or Amazon in the FIRST PLACE.
'Tis ever the conundrum. If someone can clean their Word file to the point that automagic conversion works--that the styles, etc., transfer over to an ePUB, all spit-and-shine-y,
they don't need a bloody conversion house. At that point, using a conversion house is silliness, unless they're married to a font that requires embedding, or the book has other formatting elements that can't realistically be done with Word.
Actually, this discussion comes dangerously close to pissing me off, as if everything formatters DO is simply replaced with a cut-and-paste. I'm assuming that this isn't Mr.Pointy's intent, but....it is starting to IRK me.
Hitch