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Old 03-18-2012, 04:26 PM   #7
Hitch
Bookmaker & Cat Slave
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Join Date: Apr 2010
Location: Phoenix, AZ
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mmat1 View Post
That's a most interesting workflow. I guess you run it through Adobe to get rid of Words nasty html-style.

Somewhere in the epub-forum I've seen a word-macro from toxaris which generates a clean html-output from word. Maybe you wnat to give it a try ?
Good God, NO.

I have AA X Pro, and of course Sigil, and every other tool in the box, and Acrobat's html output is HORRIFIC. I wouldn't use it for love or money. I'd rather export the AA to Word, and then import-export from there. I know that sounds cracked, but the html output by AA is just AWFUL. I mean, AWFUL.

Moreover, what everyone seems to be overlooking is that the underlying "junk" is still there...GIGO still works no matter how you dress it up.

We're a professional house, and while we use InDesign, we don't use it for any titles that are not going to have a print edition. It's easier and faster, honestly, to export from a Word processing program and clean up the html in an actual html editor like NoteTab Pro (it's our in-house tool of choice) than any other method we've found. INDD outputs TONS of garbage, as well, and a lot of garbage that can't be used in ePUBs and/or MOBI, either.

If you're struggling with Word, you can use that macro that guy here has--what is it called, BookCreator?--to clean up a manuscript fairly well, save it as RTF and then output it to html, and save yourself a bunch of brain-damage. It's how I rolled for a while when I was still a small shop, with 2-3 people, including me. It's a perfectly decent process, and if you use the 'tag italics" and "tag bold" and "tag X (insert style or whatever here)," and then clean all the other formatting, it works remarkably well. I wouldn't use it to actually MAKE the book--but to clean up Word to export fairly squeaky HTML, it works surprisingly well by making clever use of Word's built-in features, styles, etc.

HTH,
Hitch
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