Got it, tried it.
If you're spooked about providing "personal" information, lie. They connect you to the download link once you create the account; it isn't sent in an email.
It seems to be a fairly straight-forward single-file word-to-epub convertor. It does not enable word to open pre-existant epubs. There's no opportunity/easy way to edit metadata - it seems to use the Word Owner as the author of anything and everything.
Hyperlinks within the file seem to work ok in both calibre and ade (like a word-created toc). Obviously, you can't call on another file with the hyperlinking, being all single-file and all. Funny, there is a calibre_bookmarks.txt file in the generated epub. I'm not seeing any credit for our friend Kovid.
It does strip css - word embeds css-like code at the beginning of each file that Calibre does parse into real-ish css in the epub.
It converts this from the original word-htm:
Quote:
h1
{mso-style-link:"Heading 1 Char";
margin-top:12.0pt;
margin-right:0in;
margin-bottom:3.0pt;
margin-left:0in;
text-align:justify;
line-height:36.0pt;
page-break-before:always;
page-break-after:avoid;
font-size:18.0pt;
font-family:"Frutiger Linotype","sans-serif";
font-variant:small-caps;
font-weight:bold;}
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to an on-the-fly call like this:
Quote:
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<span style="font-family:sans-serif; font-size:18pt; font-variant:small-caps; font-weight:bold">Your Text Here</span>
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each time it's used.
Some things work differently on the resultant epub between ade and calibre-reader, but they do anyway. The epub does load into calibre ok, and a mobi file can be created, with all the abbreviated style bits.
And yes, Word is perfectly viable as a base-file editor for epubs/mobi. I do it all the time. No matter how you feel about Microsoft, they did do some things right with Word - tocs, spell/grammar check, thesarus, macros, search and replace by style, easily-changed styles and style sets, comments, footnotes, citations, corrections/somewhat of a revision control, blah blah blah.
There are 2 big things in Word2007 that do make it a significant improvement over 2003:
1) Style Set Management. You can create an arbitrary style set and change any document into it with little duress.
2) Interface customization. You can put an icon onto the Quick Access Toolbar for any command or feature in word including macros. Makes things oh-so-much-faster.
Sure, they moved everything around which takes some time to get used to. And they did get a little carried away with the css-embedment at the beginning of each file (I've seen it have a reference for all possible styles with a reference to every font on my machine - and I've got a boat load of those). But the help (for the most part) works.
So there.
-bjc