Quote:
Originally Posted by MacEachaidh
Do you? Okay, if that's how you see it. ;-) My comment about Word wasn't in relation to this particular search-and-replace, but that I think it's a pretty horrid application overall. It's not my choice of word processor by a long chalk.
Of course. Not sure why you seem to be lecturing me. My comment was that it's not imo an acceptable situation when even professional publishers don't bother making the effort to clean up the bits a quick run through Word and then Calibre can't get right automatically. But I have so many commercial ebooks that seem not to have even been spelling-checked, so it's not surprising they haven't been proofread for punctuation or formatting. Dismaying and arguably unacceptable, but not surprising.
|
Word is a fine Word processor, not better or worse than the rest. Some things it does better, others worse. It is not however a program specialized for writing books. You can do it, but there are better programs for that.
I am most definitely not lecturing you. It was just a general remark not aimed at you. These day and age a lot of people seem to think that computers/applications can do anything and that they don't have to think for themselves anymore. If you look for example at spelling used in Facebook, yuck.
Proofreading is very important, but also very expensive for publishers. This is even more so for self-publishing. That often leads to skipping that part. I created my Word add-in to reduce the errors (especially but not exclusively after OCR). Some parts automatic, some parts manually. For example it can convert straight-quotation marks to real quotation marks and check for missing quotation marks. Even if it finds a lot (sometimes all) errors in a document, documents would still require proofreading. There is no automatic tool that would replace that.
Again, not lecturing you. But perhaps other readers of the forum find it helpful.