Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
I want to say that Tex is my resident process expert--what he doesn't know about it ain't worth knowing.
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Also depends on how technical your team is, their current skillsets (do they all know Word or InDesign? Do they even know HTML/CSS?), and how much you can automate beforehand.
For example, I also convert my EPUBs into HTML articles to insert into websites (or specific CMSes).
Side Note: So, I automated a lot of Regex to convert clean EPUB/HTML -> HTML-for-CMS. I can now "one button push" convert my EPUB into something I can copy/paste into the CMS I work with.
Depending on your output format, things like Footnotes or Poetry might have to be handled
quite differently, and you can't rely on Ebook-specific CSS. Take the CMS example, you have
zero control over the CSS used on the website.
Also, the further you go down the rabbit hole of ONE format's specifics (example: EPUB3 Footnotes), the more you're going to have to work to convert the code into a more "format-neutral form".
There isn't no way in hell the CMS is going to handle EPUB3's:
Code:
<a href="#fn1" epub:type="noteref" >1</a>
<aside id="fn1" epub:type="footnote">
It'll probably have to be converted to basic links.
Maths??? FORGET ABOUT IT!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Now, we argue about a few things--for books that will have both print and ebook components, I prefer INDD-->ePUB, but much of this is personal preference.
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You're wrong.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
Otherwise, educate them and move on down the road. Tex and I have done many thousands of eBooks and hundreds of print and there's simply no "good" way to do this with a client that wants to be able to update the files themselves.
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If you're working B2B, consistently working with the same publisher across hundreds/thousands of documents (Journal articles, or consistently Styled books), then
perhaps you can talk... but it would require a lot of customized workflows/backends/tools.
And you're always going to come across these insane edge cases (2 columns with 1-column abstract up top? Top/Bottom floats? I want my figures to float into the margins? My book requires text to shrink like Alice in Wonderland?).
Throwing an author updating things into the mix? Yeesh... that's starting back from square one, unless you have some way to completely control/sanitize their input.
And again, every step in conversion isn't automated, there's still quite a bit of manual labor and checking that has to happen any time you convert between formats.
And Print as output? My gods, the Widows/Orphans alone...