Quote:
Originally Posted by ps67
I agree with her: learning a bit of css and html is not so difficult. I did it because I was not satisfied with the formatting of the books I was reading and now I try to modify them as little as possible so as not to be bothered by them.
Obviously those who do it for work know a lot more about it. Sometimes css is too complex and I am not able to do exactly what I would (why that indentation doesn't increase? Why the margin remains at zero and I have to give them a <br> under the image?) But now it is not so frequent.
I think I did not waste my time.
And I noticed something else: most publishers use horrible css, perhaps made with some program that is used for printing (Hitch correct me if I'm wrong) and somehow they pull out directly from it the epub, which sucks.
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Yeah, we're LOOKING AT YOU, InDesign! :-) That's usually the culprit. You can export an ePUB directly from INDD, and a lot, a LOT of print designers do just that. Don't get me wrong--we do that, too. But then we take that sucker apart, clean it, remove the cruft, etc. And of course, we have CSS mapped to pre-existing INDD named styles, to mitigate how much cleanup we have to do. These inexperienced designers don't do that--they just hand it to their
victim, er, client and tell them to upload it.
And in this day and age of el cheap-o INDD rental/subscriptions, you get a lot of so-called "print layout designers" that don't even USE styles. (I s**t thee not, it's horrifying). They use adhoc styling for every paragraph...and the resulting ePUB is simply right out of a Roger Corman film.
So, yes--generally, that's the guilty party right there.
Hitch