[gmw]

Originally Posted by MarjaE

I'm currently using NeoOffice, because of my strobe sensitivity, and LibreOffice's crashing on the Mac.

I'm having some trouble though.

I'm using tables, instead of text tables, so things with with different page widths. Otherwise I'm using simple formatting. I've had complex formatting go haywire and/or crash LibreOffice when converting between docx and odt.

I get erratic spacing when I convert to html.

I don't know anything about cleaning up the html.

I get more erratic spacing when I try to convert to epub in Calibre.

Any idea what to do about spacing and cleanup? Or how to replace the text table of contents with a hyperlinked one?

Thanks.

You probably should have started a new thread rather than activating such an old one ... but never mind, we're here now

Both LibreOffice and NeoOffice derive from OpenOffice - but that doesn't mean they are the same product, only that they have lots of similarities. I use LibreOffice (I'm still on v5.0 at the moment, I only update when I get around to it), not NeoOffice, so what I have to say may or may not apply to NeoOffice.

I am not entirely certain what you mean "I'm using tables, instead of text tables", so I can't really comment on that other than: anything beyond simple styled paragraphs and headings is very likely to cause issues when converting to HTML. Not saying it cannot be done, just saying these areas are likely to need adjustment in the HTML itself.

As for conversions between docx and odt, LibreOffice seems to do very well. Its not perfect, but I get away with using LibreOffice here while all my clients use MS-Office and about the only documents we have any difficulty exchanging are complex spreadsheets. I have had LibreOffice lock up a few times when opening doc/docx files, but it doesn't seem to happen too often (not often enough to have made me update my copy of LO).

Erratic spacing after conversion to HTML might have various causes. The first conclusion I would jump to is inconsistent using of styles. For a clean conversion to HTML you must learn how to use styles consistently - this is true whether you use MS-Office, LibreOffice, OpenOffice. Any inconsistency in your use in styles in the source document is bound to lead to problems in the HTML (and therefore the epub). There was a lengthy discussion here a few years ago (see this thread, but you may have to page around a bit to find the relevant posts).

That thread mentions that I use an OpenOffice/LibreOffice plugin called writer2xhtml to produce an epub directy, which I then clean-up in Sigil. This plugin does produce a hyperlinked table of contents from the source table of contents. However, support for this plugin (part of a package called writer2latex see here) has faded out about 2 years ago and there have been issues with later versions of LibreOffice (which I have been able to fix for myself, so I'm still using it). You may have better luck with writer2epub (see sub-forum here in MR), but I've never used it so cannot speak for how well it works.


As to how to clean-up HTML ... that's a big topic. I use Sigil, but I've read that the Calibre epub editor is coming along okay, so you may prefer to try that. A tool like this lets you switch back forth between the raw HTML and what it will look like. ... But how useful this is will partly depend on how much you know, or are will to learn, about HTML and CSS.

It's not really that difficult to learn enough for what you need in most epubs, but it will take a lot of time if you are starting from scratch - so you may need to get help. I could direct you to some useful HTML/CSS tutorial sites, but these may be overwhelming because they talk about a lot of stuff you will never (or should never) try to use in a epub. Also, you can open existing epubs you already have to get an idea of how things are done.