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Originally Posted by AlanHK
I'd never do that if I'm starting from an ePub, or any ebook format really.
Structural things like h1, h2, etc can get lost. Images can get converted and degraded.
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Most of those considerations aren't an issue for me in this project, but your POV is totally valid, and I'm scaling down the process I described anyway.
Initially I came at this out of a desire for a clean slate. I wanted to start out (in the calibre editor) with a clean ePub that would be free of unwanted source related things: formatting errors, quality issues, and other stuff I just didn't want for whatever reason. I also had hopes that my approach would give me a convenient way to maintain a design that could be imported easily.
It didn't really work out the way I had hoped, though, because now I see that the import process is going to take a lot more work to set up in the way I had envisioned. I'm now bypassing all of that and just doing what you described. (On the plus side, this experience taught me a lot and I now have a pretty strong set of project and design documents.)
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Look out for numbered styles, like "calibre123" that can have a different definition in each book.
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Yes, dealing with those styles is a pain. I used to do what you suggested (try to salvage some of it for my own stylesheets) but I grew tired of getting lost in all the crazy organization, redundancies, etc. and I no longer even bother to look at any of it these days. Instead, I just spend time up front (right after starting a new ePub document) running global copy and paste operations and deleting it all.
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I also like to get the covers for the original books and use them instead of a bare heading.
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I haven't yet decided which covers I'll end up going with, but yes, I'll be devoting time to covers soon. (Also considering a possible "covers gallery" side project featuring all covers from all editions.)
Oh, and footnotes. I ended up going with an endnote approach, where each book has its own endnotes section.