I am very appreciative of Kovid's work on Calibre and my wife and I use it quite a bit. I have helped my wife create some HTML+CSS templates and Notepad++ macros which she uses nearly every week to create an ebook version of a Bible study weekly lesson that our church uses. She actually does it twice, once in Spanish and once in English. She creates both LRF and EPUB versions from a single HTML file using Calibre.
I recently got an HTC Hero Android phone and an iPod Touch which both require the EPUB format while my, and my father-inlaw's Sony eReader 700's will theoretically handle either.
I use fbReader on the HTC Hero and Stanza on the iPod Touch. She emails both versions to me and I download them individually to each device directly from GMail. The EPUB version works brilliantly on the HTC Hero and Stanza but there are big differences from between the LRF and EPUB versions on the eReader 700.
I have tried to attach one of the week's documents if anyone would like to see the differences. There are cosmetic differences that aren't really that important but there is a very big functional difference.
To be clear, I reported this difference on the Sigil bug site and learned that it is not an Sigil error so much as maybe "feature" of EPUB or perhaps the handling of EPUB on the Sony 700.
The documents we create make very heavy use of named anchors that allow the reader to jump from the text to a cited Bible verse and then return back to continue reading. I'm not sure if that extremely brief explanation is sufficient but if you look at these files you immediately see what I mean.
The fbReader and Stanza render the EPUB very nicely. When I select one of the named links in the text I jump to the destination. When I selected the carefully crafted named link there to return me back to the original location it works flawlessly. The LRF works exactly the same way on the Sony eReader.
The EPUB on the Sony, however, completely fails. Sometimes the links don't seem to work at all or are difficult to trigger. When they are triggered they jump to a position in the document other than the section of text that contains the named link.
The behavior is so far from the desired result that I consider the EPUB unusable in this scenario.
I am relatively confident that this has nothing to do with Sigil or Calibre but with Sony's rendering of the EPUB and I know none of us can do anything about that. I just wanted to point out that there are, in my opinion, compelling reasons to use the LRF format over EPUB.
If anyone has any ideas how this could be better handled I would love to discuss it separately. I could also provide an original HTML file that we use to generate the ebook files.
Lesson 2 - Sabbath School - 2010-01.epub
Lesson 2 - Sabbath School - 2010-01.lrf
-Jon