Quote:
Originally Posted by lumpynose
After reading all of the stuff that you do do I'm a bit surprised that you don't also edit the formatting.  |
This is actually a fair point. There are two responses I guess.
First is that I've never really got my head around regexes. I can do them but it always takes me way more trial and error than I'd like. Anyway what that means is that whereas I've scripted a lot of tasks, I have no toolkit of "standard edits" that I can apply. So editing is a manual task that takes a while. So it has to be egregious for me to break out Sigil to fix.
Second, I think that a lot of people edit to change formatting to their preferred style rather than fix "errors". I have preferences but I can live with someone else's so long as the text is legible and not distracting. The kind of thing I consider an error and would want to fix is where a close tag is missing and a whole block of text shows up as bold underlined instead of a single word. Or messed up tables.
I also think, and I could be wrong, that the things that are easiest to fix are the formatting preferences, whereas the instances of what I call "errors" tend to be individual and so not susceptible to standard edits.
Oh and if it requires my actual attention rather than simply a few standard global replaces, then I'd much rather do it after I've read the book and can't be spoiled. But once I've read it it only makes sense to edit if I plan to re-read.