Quote:
Originally Posted by eschwartz
Like I said, start using Sigil as your first step, instead of relying on the hack of converting to create an ORIGINAL_EPUB.
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but I like my lazy "hack" and the conversion does some useful other extra stuff (listed below) that I'd otherwise have to do manually every time, which would be repetitively tedious. It also calibre-izes the class names,which suits me, as I am familiar with that naming convention & can find may way around the CSS easily.
in fact I am currently favouring an added 2nd step.
1.The epub to epub convert to add my own extra css, regularise css class names, regularise page_styles , expand css ( for ease of editing), apply my preferred font key sizes....
2 ( new step) modify epub to remove un-necessary spans before manual edits.
3. edit with sigil....
so there's a lot of normalisation stuff going on in step 1.
PS looking ahead, if some completely new epub reader device came out that needed a different approach to CSS, then that would be another reason for starting over from original_epub. When I switched from Sony readers to what I have now, there were various settings that I used to apply in conversion that did not look good on Kobo / tablets, and there were other things which the Sony used to ignore that now needed extra CSS preference coding - line heights, hyphens.
I've made short term decisions with other media in the past & regretted them as hardware & costs changed e.g. ripping my music CDs at 160 VBR & not 320 CBR, converting DVDs to compressed video to save space - because on my old small monitor there was no difference..... So learning from that, I now try to preserve an as-close-to-source-as-possible backup whenever I add anything to PC.
For e-books, for me that means capture it after any DRM strip but before anything else gets done. Then if a book store goes about of business (remember Sony! ) , or I lose the credentials for a site, it's no loss. And ideally ( here comes the dead horse again) - keep that stuff in calibre so I have a grand total of ONE books collections program & database to manage & backup.
Neigh
