[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Oliva

Quoth, why do you think that KindleGen is not a good validation tool to produce a mobi? The epubs I made in Jutoh are without errors, but when I check it with epubcheck in Sigil they tend to be full of warnings. Maybe it’s Sigil’s bugs, who knows?

With all due respect, we know. The folks with whom you are chatting. Unless you've done something improper with Sigil, it's not likely--not remotely likely--to be Sigil's bugs. Sigil's bugs are different and have virtually nothing to do with validation.

Of course I use styles religiously for hierarchical headings and for absolutely everything else. But I found that using Libreoffice for style formatting is ... painful. I have sometimes spent a whole day manually removing direct ad hoc formatting from some complex and long texts, before i found Atlantis word processor, Jutoh and Sigil. Same with bookmarks, toc creation, links ... There are much easier softwares that automate a lot of these tedious manual tasks, find errors, optimize the output for different destinations and much more.

I'm sorry, what software are you talking about that "automates" a lot of these tedious tasks, exactly? Anything like that--typically Apple programs--will have a godawful spaghetti of crud under the hood. Anybody here EVER seen the underside of an ePUB created with iAuthor? Moses on a pony, preserve us, it's the worst S**t I've EVER seen and kids, that's saying something. People talk about how "Word makes bad code," but Word is bloody pristine compared to the utter S***E that comes out of Pages or iAuthor. (Pages, typically; iAuthor every bloody time.) And Vellum? That magic app that all the Mac users think is the Best.Thing.Ever? Oy vey. (n.b.: to be fair to Vellum, they have obviously put in yeoman's work on the CSS and media-queries and they obviously spent a crapload of time developing "drop caps" that work even on the PPW family of devices. I gotta give props where props are due.) Or Kindle Create? Ditto, ditto, ditto. The one thing that they have in common is that they are all EASY.

Sigil is not "Word (LO/OO) for eBooks." Nobody ever said it was. Sigil is an ePUB editor and an ePUB creator, for those who know how to use HTML and CSS. It's not a WYSIWYG magic eBook maker, like Vellum, god protect us all from that POS. Sigil automates a great number of tasks--like creating the NCX and TOCs, for that matter and the OPF and I'm eternally grateful that I no longer have to create those by hand (although, absolutely everyone should, at least once, to get that knowledge in their bones.)

ATLANTIS:
I may have some guilt here. I introduced someone at KDP to Atlantis. I told him that he could use it from Word (e.g., Word-->Atlantis--ePUB) to make an ePUB, which does work complete with embedded fonts. I did warn him that the code is...well, it ain't pretty. BUT, it will get you there from here. He'd had months of fighting with Kindle Create and I simply couldn't watch it any longer. He's been spreading the gospel of AWP (and espousing my brilliance, which was an unintended consequence which I've asked him to tone down a bit), ever since. AWP should probably pay me, at this point. (j/k)

Sure, simple novels are easy enough to do in a word processor. But any complex non-fiction, I don't think so. Same with font embedding and subsetting, any decorative elements, svg images, complex typography ... But maybe I'm just over-complicating.

Weeelll, I have to confess, I personally do relatively complex non-fiction from Word my own self. For my in-house handouts and the like. It can be done. It's a bit painstaking, but the truth is, complex non-fiction in anything is painstaking. (TEX, where are you to discuss LaTEX? I mean, yes, LaTEX has plenty of non-fic muscle, but god FORFEND you then need eBooks!)

Having said that, my personal preference--yes, wait, heresy coming!--is to take a Word layout like that and kerplunk it right into INDD and then proceed forthwith to do both print and then the eBooks. IF you do it right (HUGE caveat here!), it's not horrible. YES, yes, before someone here chimes in (has you-know-who been banned again?), InDesign can create some of the world's worst cruddy code, but if you're smart, you create named styles that will nicely map to your CSS and that's half your damn fight right there. If you map styles, you don't have to clean up all that cruft later. Or at least, a lot of it.

For print, I agree, you cannot use print to make an ebook. But I found, vice versa it’s easier: i.e. if you already have a very clean ebook, it’s easy to use that to then modify or add print-specific elements in a desktop publishing software like Scribus or VivaDesigner (or InDesign). Print is its own, completely different, animal.

Dahlink, you know that I disagree with you, but with the utmost respect. Bookmaking, by and large, is more art than science, even here in the eBookWorld. P.S.: Affinity's Publisher app is on-sale, of late, for a lousy $25 buckeroos. They've been so cheap that I licensed all three--their Publisher app, their Photo app and the other one, oh, Deigner (AI's competition), each, "just in case." You never know when Adobe might do something (again) to piss me off terminally, like when they spit on those of us who'd spent many thousands on fonts and introduced their font cloud doodah. As well as, of course, spitting on those of us who'd licensed INDD for Six thou, and made it so cheap that any Tom Dick or Harriet could license it for 3 months. FIE on you, Adobe!

I’m sure with your experience you have a very efficient and streamlined workflow. I am still flailing around to find out what works for me.

And, there it is. Despite the processes and simplification (and complication) over the last decade, every eBookmaker and print bookmaker has to find their own way. Everybody has a path that they find for themselves. All the folks here can do is try to stop you from wasting a shedload of time, doing things that we all found an utter waste, ourselves, but sometimes, bookmakers need to learn things the hard way.

Hitch