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Old 03-14-2017, 03:53 PM   #747
Gregg Bell
Gregg Bell
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Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: Itasca, Illinois
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Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCunney View Post
Uh huh.

You use Libre Office Writer to create your work in the first place. That's your original source document. Then you convert to ePub, and tweak endlessly till you are ready to drop the result on Amazon. The result you drop on Amazon will increasingly diverge from your source document.

What happens if you decide to do a rewrite, and produce a version 2 of the book? (More likely in non-fiction, I think, but happens in fiction, too.)

Do you think you can do that in Sigil? (I don't.) So you have to go back to the LO Writer file you started from and redo that, but it won't have all the tweaks you added after the fact in Sigil, so you must redo all of those (and remember what you did because there isn't a good way of recording them and automating doing it again).

The whole point I am making is the need to master your tools to reduce the amount you will tweak after the fact. In a perfect world, you could convert from LO Writer to ePub and everything will be good enough that Sigil isn't required. It's an imperfect world, so Sigil will remain in the workflow.

But as much as possible, tweaks should not be made to do something you didn't know how to do in LO but can do after the fact in Sigil. You should know how to do it in LO.

I'd start keeping records when I fiddled in Sigil on what changes I made and why, and review periodically to see where better knowledge of LO would have eliminated the need to tweak in Sigil, then go back and play with LO to acquire the knowledge.
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Dennis
Thanks Dennis. You're absolutely right. And now that I need to do different formatting for Createspace and the paperbacks I'm really going to streamline things so I rely much more on LO as my base source.
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