Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
preserving all the code. Every time you fiddle with the font size/type, margins, or anything else whatsoever, and I do mean anything, it creates a set of tags to change the meaning of just that little chunk. Then backspacing a word, adding in new words, cutting/pasting stuff around, divides it up even more till you have an absolute soup of a mess, which you don't see till you try editing in an epub editor. Ideally, writers should use nothing but styles, and then a straightforward conversion would be nice and neat. writer2epub is designed to filter out most of that junk, whereas odt-->EPUB conversion will try to duplicate the look and feel exactly.
By cracking open a book in Sigil/calibre, you can often see a horrible mess of span tags containing font sizes/families and margins, bold/italics turned into yet more span tags, and worse stuff. Oftentimes each word/phrase in a paragraph will have the same styles individually applied to that word.
Obviously, your mileage will vary depending on the book. And MS Word (used without styles) is the worst offender. But writer2epub for LibreOffice and Toxaris' addon for Word are supposed to occupy a sane middle ground between leaving in the cruft and going the Smashwords Nuclear Method then going in and reapplying the formatting.
Really, it all depends on how clean your editing process is, I suppose.
|
That's a great explanation. I saw what you were talking about when I converted my early .doc novels (the cruft). Lately though I have been using Styles and the conversions have been remarkably clean.
Since I have become Mr. Linux and have been using Libreoffice I haven't noticed any styles there per se, but I just format the paragraph to .1 inches (would that be considered using a Style?) and then hit the enter key for a new paragraph (never the tab key). Again the .odt-turned-html seems to be very clean when I enter it in a text editor or Sigil. And I'm sure that has a lot to do with the fact that I'm writing very simple books too.
I think I was wondering too with the window that comes up when you want to save from odt to html in LO. It's like 'you may lose data if you save in html.'
But I never seem to lose anything.