Quote:
Originally Posted by sherman
Wherever the original source came from, this was definitely an eye-opener for me.
As an aside, I have found that word can output acceptable (filtered) html. However, that relies on the author knowing how to use styles...
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course it does. But, to be fair, it relies on that no matter WHAT the source. I don't care if it's OO, LO, Scrivener, Jutoh, you-name-it, no command of styles, you get garbage. Ad-hoc styling is the bane of ebook-makers everywhere. It's really no different in Sigil or Calibre, for that matter; it's all GIGO. You put in ad hoc styles, or try to "style" things in Sigil BookView,and the other side looks like the dog's breakfast.
There is simply no way of getting around it--someone, somewhere, has to apply styles. Whether the author does it initially (in wich case, they mostly don't need bookmakers), or the bookmaker cleans it all up, and applies them, either in Word or ??? or in HTML via CSS...it's all the same thing. It's even thus in print layout. There's no alternative.
IME, which is not small, Word frankly does a better job of outputting reasonably decent styles in filtered HTML than
anything else, period. It's faster to clean up than almost anything else; more tools, more macros, etc., out there to assist. {shrug}. Lots of folks will argue that "markup is better," and of course, in some ideal parallel universe, that's true...but no author is going to write in MARKUP, it's just daft. Of the remaining choices, programs, etc., Word is the best option, all told.
Hitch