Quote:
Originally Posted by blackest
I'm not the quote i found using calibre just pretty much showed how to use the regular expressions. Indesign spans, calibre spans , I don't like spans.
Sigil and spans that hasn't got much span in it 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE
finding lots of flawed epub generators, I think pages will take an indesign file now and not put spans around every word. It can't justify text but its better in some aspects. only thing that seems to handle pages fixed layout is ibooks so far playbooks which normally does a good job chokes on it even though everything validates! |
I read the thread.
About 40% of our business is taking INDD files and making them into decent eBooks. And yes, Fixed-layout is part of that.
You can clean the spans, or not. While cleaning the code fulfils your inner geek, it doesn't really DO anything for the FXL ePUB. The ePUB doesn't work better, or not, based on those bloody spans. Yes, to those of us who stare at them, they're offensive, but...largely, they're also harmless. (n.b.: I have seen a situation in which when the offending spans were cleared out, the resulting FXL text wasn't as FXL as it ought to have been--the text would actually reflow, within the specific element, which was a bit of an eye-opener.)
I don't know of any magic app, that makes this process less painful. Our company's go-tos are Sigil and Epsilon; we use the latter for heavier-duty coding clips, but Sigil is near and dear to my own heart and that of several of our bookmakers.
I looked at Vellum, and yeah, if you're an author with no tech skills, it probably looks like the answer to a dream, albeit a limited one. Ditto all the others. I confess I've never heard of Brackets, but we're a PC- or Linux-using biz, not Mac users.
Sorry that I don't have a magic wand app, but...INDD is what it is. Once you make friends with it, the easier path IMHO is to edit the ninety-bajillion style overrides, in INDD, that you get from INDD users (esp. the inexperienced ones) and then the output is less horrible.
I do know some people who use INDD to make their eBooks, sans print books; I think they're insane, but people use what they're used to, don't they?
Offered solely FWIW.
Hitch