Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Well...FWIW, we deal with this all day long. We not only get files from myriad different designers--and we have zero control over this--but we get a lot of them from, god help us, Indy authors that have signed up for a whole MONTH of INDD, and think that they know how to use it. What we get from those folks is typically worse than the worst Word files, for the same reason--ad hoc styles, etc.
We go through and fix the INDD files, first. To me, that's the simplest method, and then export to HTML/ePUB, and do regex cleaning from there.
If you stopped using regex because the text was overflowing, your CSS is wrong, as Diap mentioned. OR, if you think that there's an actual bug, post it so that the guys can fix it, but I don't recall us running into this, not anytime in the past 5 years+.
If you're doing this commercially, you can't "fix" the problem. You'll simply keep getting cruft, like we do. But working in WYSIWYG, or manually deleting the additional paragraph codes--that's utter crap use of your time and worse, you're going to have junk below.
Why on EARTH anyone that's used INDD for more than 10 minutes would use different styles, from one chapter to another...only God knows. It's bad enough that we still get Book-mode files, in which I end up having to sometimes reassemble files. Just because that's "how we've always done it." (sigh).
Have you tried exporting the main content to doc or docx format, if you're copy-pasting? At least that way, you should retain the font characteristics like italics, etc. (Of course, that assumes that they're not creating faux italics, which happens ALL the freaking time, or using spans, or, or or...)
Hitch
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Thanks Hitch a lot for your comments. Seems I am not the only one struggling with indd files. I'll also try your approach to fix the indd file. I am doing this actually as a volunteer to a non-profit and I am a complete noob, only been helping them for 3 months. So on my regular work (online marketing agency) I time all my work to calculate profit. So, I did the same, and it took me like 3x more to fix the indd file than to manually copy/paste into Sigil, take out the new paragraphs manually and do italics. Imagine how bad was the indd file
But good, point, I will try it again and will check again of what I think it was a bug. It was strange because it only did it on some paragraphs, not some. I'll check and report if really a bug.
Thanks to everyone for your comments. I have lots of new stuff to try and its good for me to have a reality check that this is not a simple process but depends a lot on the source file and has multiple steps.