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Old 04-02-2016, 08:15 AM   #50
sanjon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by bookman156 View Post
Be interesting to hear how people generally approach making an EPUB from scratch. I suppose if you have an InDesign file already you'd make one from that, but if I wanted to kinda write the book itself from scratch into an EPUB? Maybe it would seem natural to write it as webpages in Dreamweaver, as I'm quite used to that and it uses the tags I prefer. Or perhaps it would be better to design it in InDesign. Do people create EPUBs from scratch in Sigil?
I think I would start from a Word file because you can visualize the book as you write it. Then save the document as Web Page, Filtered to get the HTML file. Of course Word introduces a lot of garbage and inline styles but I have a script that cleans all of that out and adds some custom styles.

Otherwise I would just use something like Notepad++ (or in your case Dreamweaver) to write the book in HTML and just view it in the browser every once in a while. Although I feel like the writing experience wouldn't be the same.

Calibre is quite good at making the actual EPUB if you supply it with a single HTML file and will break it up into separate files. So there is no need to start with an EPUB.

I must say though that I don't have much experience with writing, this is just what I do for conversions. And I don't even know if those are best practices

Last edited by sanjon; 04-02-2016 at 08:18 AM.
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