Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
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
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The default style names from IDD are atrocious. Then there are the decimalized font sizes like 1.02em. And all that excess code like font-weight: normal and text-transform: none and other crap that's not needed. If I was getting paid to make an a book and using IDD, I would make it so it looks good for print and then when the ePub is made, spend the time to clean it up so it looks good as an eBook even if I had to change some of the layout so it doesn't match the pBook.
eBooks and pBooks are not the same and the layout doesn't always have to match.