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As this seems to be devolving from an embeddment thread to a css thread, let me first of all apologize to the developers who took my off-hand remark on my own problems with css to heart, as no offense was intended at all. All the developers' efforts are way more than I could do myself, and my appreciation of their efforts and generosity truly runs deep. Really really.
My css problems are largely my own. Neophyte: here.
A lot of my troubles, I understand, are stemmed from the outrageously complex process I adopted, per se:
1) Start in Word 2007. I've built a Quickstyle set that has all the (current) permutations I'm interested in. I'm mapping to the basic fonts on the Sony Reader 700. Proves handy, as their metrics are close to things like times new roman and arial (and so fairly universal). Also, that's what's in the house. Edit until happy.
2) Save as HTM-Filtered, utf-8 encoding.
3) Open in DreamWeaver CS4.
4) Use Dreamweaver's "Clean up Word" function, then strip out word-implanted css <style>--</style> at top of file.
5) Attach styles.css, which happen to match the Quickstyle set in both style-call-names, and attributes. Well, close enough.
6) Convert to XHTML1.1 out of dreamweaver. Save.
7) import into calibre, add metadata, cover graphics, etc, render epub.
The gauntlet I run through here is replicable, and with enough supporting visual basic scripts in word, fairly fast. So I can go back and fix in word, redo everything in the steps above and have it come out: fixed.
I've got certain attribute calls in the css joined up at the top - makes it easier to change font sets (just once or twice, as opposed to several dozen places), and to factor out the left-quote variants. Mobipocket does not have the horizontal resolution that epub does, which is part of my process - to also make kindle-ready stuff. By changing a couple lines in the css, and re-importing the file into calibre, I can render the file both ways with an acceptable amount of fuss.
All this horsing around is the warmups for embedding/encrypting fonts outside of indesign. My recent failure on encryption have been commented to the encryption-script developer. And yes, I'm doing something wrong there, too.
Attached is the word 2007 quickstyleset, post-dreamweaver source html+css, calibre-generated source zip, and resultant epub. No font embedding. Still working on drop caps - hard to universalize without scripting in epub (ignore them, please).
Oh, on left-quote variants. The typography sites, books and blogs I've been perusing all say the same thing: put the left quote marks in the margin, so the 1st actual letters of the paragraphs line up vertically. And they are right - it is nicer to look at. And any little tweak we can get out of epub, we should take advantage of.
How it appears in ADE is what I keep hoping I can reproduce into a Windows Mobile Epub reader. Current softwares are continuing to improve, and I pray they do so until we are all happy.
-bjc
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