[Hitch]

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

I used to charge less to make an EPUB from Word files than from PDF. But it ends up about the same amount of work. I have ONCE received perfectly-formatted DOC files which converted near-automatically. Just once.

Well, as I say here on the forum, I see headings and styles used about once out of every 100 files that I see, in word-processing formats. Now, arguably, you could say that the sort of folks that pay for formatting are by definition not techy, so that's not surprising. However, I'm constantly surprised that authors seem to have zero interest in learning their own tools well enough to make their own lives easy.

Nonetheless, Wombat, I would never--or pretty much never--charge the same for a Word file as a PDF. We do the old-school way, with PDFs--Abbyy, clean-up, build a new PDF from the new Word file, run compare, fix anything that isn't a perfect match, lather-rinse-repeat until we get a perfect Compare. THEN start the book building, from the final Word file. I don't see how you can charge the same, for that. (I wouldn't mind charging for word-processing files what we charge for PDFs, no two ways about it.) I mean, you must have a rockingly gracious and well-heeled clientele, but mine would run for the hills and Fiverr. (I've lost track of the number of times I've had to--patiently--explain that we don't just use machines and push buttons.)

Originally Posted by najgori

in indesigns cc 2018 paragraph styles tab there is a export tagging options where you can map headings and other indesign styles to appropriate html tags.

in the same tab there is also edit all export tags where you can choose which tag to include in html so when you export indesign to epub you get pretty clean html file.

if you have indesign files there is no reason to use pdf to make epub.

Oh, I'd agree with your last statement, at least. I'd never use a PDF, if I have the INDD files, typically. I would say that Adobe's marketing strategy of making the product cheap on a lease basis, in the cloud, has inflicted a crapload of really inferior INDD Files on us, complete with adhoc styles and all sorts of cruft. There are, therefore, times when using the PDF is an act of self-defense, the INDD files are that bad.

Style mapping, IF IT WORKS, would be most welcome, but honestly, everyone who works in the business already does this through the expedience of naming conventions. I mean, who doesn't already have INDD templated styles, that map to existing CSS sheets? And really, even if you don't, regex is your friend.

Originally Posted by exaltedwombat

The trouble with InDesign is that it is very much a print layout program. It knows where lines break. It isn't always so interested in whether it's a linefeed or a paragraph.

Exactly this--and it knows where stuff GOES, but not WHY it goes there. Not to mention all the other wee things, setting everyting in px, pts, yadda. Oh, and let's not forget--I'm sure that Wombat has run into this--getting a file in which the italicized font doesn't actually exist--it was made by the program, not embedded in the file. (Yup, we had a really fun run-in with that once...)

I would say this--there's really no such thing as an easy, insta-conversion. Certainly, not any longer. If a file is that easy, the author/publisher has probably already done it themselves.

We're doing fewer books these days, because almost every book we get takes longer to do, is harder to do, and costs us more time and the client more money. I've recently been known to say that the books are worse and the clients as well. By which I mean not that they are awful people or whatever, but the folks who were tech-savvy published their books in 2010 or thereabouts. Then the next wave--somewhat less tech-savvy, but game to learn. Then the next, and so on and so forth, until now we get the folks who have hotmail, yahoo and aol email addresses; who don't know that a file extension means anything, and we are also getting books that couldn't have been converted in 2010, or even 2015; tables, columns, sidebars, languages with glyphs that weren't supported, plays, etc., etc., etc.

The combination is, IMHO, exhausting, and honestly, not wildly profitable. I'm actually in the process of writing YAFAQ (Yet Another FAQ), containing more and more entries that people won't google themselves, apparently,

Spoiler:

(I'm considering naming it the LMGTFYFAQ...)

and I'm building a chatbot to answer common questions, just so I don't have to do that any longer ("do I need an ISBN?" " How do I register my copyright?" "Is the 70% royalty mean I've got to be exclusive with Amazon?" and ad infinitum.)

Hitch