[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Yep. When I got frustrated with all the horrible documents I was getting, I blamed Word.

All throughout school, I got taught and used it all wrong (Direct Formatting)... and everyone I ever knew used Word that crappy way too. And every time the document exploded? I blamed Word.

When I finally decided to mess around with Word, professionally, a few years ago (mostly because of your highest of praises for Toxaris's EPUBTools)... I actually spent ~30 minutes learning Styles from those 2 tutorial videos.

I exported as "Clean HTML"—expecting the usual disaster I read about on forums (and saw) for years. Nope, everything turned out relatively clean.

That's the day you won me over.

(And I couldn't believe how many years I wasted... solved in less than an hour.)

You know, I had a bit of an advantage, in a backward way.

I came to eBooks as a hobby first, as y'all know, PG eBooks on an ancient Kindle, etc. How I got there was via Mobipocket, which humorously, Mr. Hitch found for me, because a) the Kindle had been gifted to him, by his sister, not me, and b) he at the time couldn't find any non-fiction books, nearly at all, for him to read on it.

Anyway, I started out with the Word-->MBPC software. I immediately realized that HTML was sorta like Wordperfect (tags!) and when I wanted to tweak something, I could do it inside the HTML.

So...I very early on saw the relationship between Word-->CSS/HTML. Not some act of genius, just...thar she blows! Most of the rest of this crowd, here and the eBook crowd, back in those days, tended to be nerdy and disdain MSFT, so they started out with Markdown, hand-coding, etc. and ePUB. My backdoor into eBooks, commercially, started out with Word, and Word-->HTML so...you know.

* * *

Then when I saw how amazing Toxaris's tools were—just like you said—that's the day I added Microsoft Word as an integral part of my conversion toolkit.

(Some snippage about Toxaris' ePUB tools with which I wholeheartedly agree.)

When I took the entire ebook-making process into account, Word slotted itself in there in a few key situations.

(Just like using spreadsheet programs for complex tables!!! )

Yes, perzackly.

Originally Posted by Quoth

I've not looked at Word2003 or Word2007 HTML export, but Word XP (even with styles) is horrid HTML compared to LO Writer 5.x - 6.x, however since I switched from Mobi Creator to Calibre I never use HTML export.

You know, I believe I may have started with a version of Word that ran on XP and I truly don't remember it being such a problem. I mean, compared to what you can do today, maybe, but the fundies of Word, that Styles=HTML and that you can directly map them if you are so inclined, that's all the same.

The PDF export on some versions of Word is an option MS plug-in which seems to have vanished. But the PDF export on Writer 5.x and 6.x seems perfect. MS Word PDF export sometimes on plug in on Word XP didn't do correct page breaks.

There was, for some years, a deliberate incompatibility, due to a dispute between MSFT and Adobe. That's been resolved for...oh, 5-6 years now or a bit longer? Even their lowest-end PDF export works fine. (And in fact, works better for printing font exemplars directly from my font manager than does an Adobe export!)

If you have to deal with other people's Word docs a lot, then MS Word may be best. (some snippage by Hitch, sorry!)

Actually, if you have to deal with other people's cruft a lot, MS Word+Toxaris's ePUB Tools beats Calibre hands-down. It just does. I cannot tell you what a godsend those tools are, particularly for taking some Ad Hoc nightmare, tagging all the text formatting (local) like bold, italics, etc. and being able to, in one fell swoop, nuke all the other ad hoc formatting. It's ...fantastic.

I had to convince one of my OWN people, who was absolutely insistent that her own PERL program for cleaning files, in HTML, was the bomb. That it did everything. I forget all the details now, but I proved to her that a quick pre-clean, with Tox's ePUBTools and marking the localized text formatting was actually superior to her PERL clips. And it WAS.

Like I said--and I believe I've told the story here more than once--for probably a decade, I was a staunch anti-Word person. Oh, no, Word was terrible, blabbety-blab, WordPerfect was superior (at the time, I say it still was), you couldn't see the codes, OH THE HUMANITY!

But once I stopped trying to force Word to meet my expected behaviors, and all that and sat down and looked at the thought process, etc., behind it--like Tex, took a few minutes and actually learned it--it's quite simple to make it behave. And frankly, today, it's leaps and bounds ahead of WP, for HTML, fersure. I had to recently do a WPerf project, both for print and HTML and god help me, it was a nightmare. No easy way to clean it and on and on.

I don't have some agita about LO. It's a nice, clean program by and large. If memory serves--and it may not!--it has some glaring omissions with which I can't live, and that's why I stick to Word. I mean, personally as well as professionally, where realistically, I don't have a choice. The moment you start dealing in commercial non-fiction books, with footnotes, endnotes, cross-references and index tagging, you can't leave Word or you're doomed.

For example, if you're doing a print book using INDD or almost anything else in creation (no, Tex, I'm not talking about LaTEX, thanks), you desperately need those Word tags, to keep your sanity down the process. Trust me.

(I have a horror story, truly, about a customer, Word, indices and foototes, and *&^%$#@* Google Docs. Three times, his bloody index and x-ref tags disappeared, from the Word files we sent him. Three TIMES. We couldn't figure it out, until we finally asked him HOW he was reviewing, and editing, etc. the returned file. To be clear, this was during a line-edit portion of the work we were doing for him. He finally said "on an iPad" and when I pursued it further, turned out he was BY DEFAULT opening the goddamned files in GDocs and editing them, or even not, but just SAVING them and what happens? Yes, yes, yes, you guessed right--all the tagging, etc. totally disappeared. We redid that book 3x. What a nightmare.)

Hitch