Quote:
Originally Posted by FDPuthuff
As long as it looks like I expect in an eReader, or previewer, am I good as far as the code?
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For the most part, if you KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid), you'll be fine.
I wrote a bit about some "things to look out for" in
Post #53+ in "Why is it so hard to preserve blank lines?".
Also look at those 2 Reddit threads I linked where I gave basic code samples (Scenebreaks, Fleurons, etc.).
There's a handful of other key "things to look out for", like:
- color text
- If you force black text, then turn on Night Mode, you'll get black-on-black text.
That one's very easy to miss, since if you're in Word/Print, it's always on a white page. But ebooks are different, people can read using all different font/background colors.
Side Note: Amazon
will ding you if you force the text's font color for your book. It's against their
Kindle Publishing Guidelines (PDF).
Quote:
Originally Posted by FDPuthuff
In my tests, I see a lot of HTML that I am not as familiar with.
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Most tools export a bunch of detrimental/useless garbage (especially for ebooks).
Quote:
Originally Posted by FDPuthuff
Will the EPUD file work on most eReaders young and old? Or are there 'things' I need to change the tags on because it just makes things unreadable on older devices and or phones?
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For a basic Fiction book, you barely need any CSS classes. They can mostly be boiled down to:
- Actual Book
- Headings
- First paragraphs
- Scenebreaks
- occasionally Center/Right aligned text
- Frontmatter
- Title/Subtitle
- Copyright Page (maybe smaller font, and/or gaps between paragraphs)
- Table of Contents (negative indent stuff)
Almost everything else should be a simple <p> (paragraph).
For Non-Fiction, things get a little more complicated, because you're dealing with Footnotes/Diagrams/Captions/Tables/etc.
Quote:
Originally Posted by FDPuthuff
So, when you have a 'perfectly' styled Word doc and you send it through Calibre, or your app of choice, you get your EPUB file.
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You'll want something that keeps the Style names in the output HTML.
IF (and this is a big if) you Style your DOCX properly, even a simple Word "Save As Filtered HTML"
could work with some massaging.
Calibre tries its best to recreate the look of the original source document.
It doesn't keep Word's Style names -> CSS classes though, and converts a lot of them to "block_#" or "calibre#".
Its method is also more GIGO (Garbage-In, Garbage Out):
If your source file stinks, Calibre tries its best, but you'll get messy out.
Clean file in? Relatively clean file out.
Toxaris's EPUB Tools is my personal favorite. It exports very clean HTML, and even has an option to keep the Word Styles -> CSS (Settings > HTML Export > Retain own stylenames).
Its method is more "Strip/clean up all the junk" + "Output very clean EPUB+CSS". This lets you do tweaking of the EPUB's code much more easily, since 99% of the crap is gone.
There are many more ways of converting DOCX to EPUB... but these are probably too advanced (and this post is getting a little long).
But, with any of these methods, consistent usage of Styles will make any conversion steps 1000% easier/cleaner.
