Quote:
Originally Posted by DNSB
Before sending to my ereader, I take a quick look at an epub in ADE and/orThorium and/or calibre's ebook viewer—it takes about 3 pages for an edit/don't edit decision. About half the books need minor tweaks but there are some where you wonder about the person who created the ebook. Did they have a high school student as an intern who is learning InDesign on the job. Then you have the CSS and text files that look like entries in the obfuscated C contest.
Most often, the changes I make are settings the margins from the body tag to 0 and widows and orphans to 1. That way I can control the margins and avoid the $%^&* idiots who set the margins to ~2.5cm on every side—the paperback emulation view. My preferred editor is Sigil though I also use calibre's editor since there are tasks that are easier on one than the other. For the cleanup, I have a collection of saved searches for Sigil that make it fast and easy to clean up most epubs. |
I do remember seeing one Kindle eBook (I think self-published) where the CSS was nothing but media queries. Quite a mess.
Vellum makes more of a mess of the code then InDesign. At least with InDesign, you can sort of see some method to the madness. With Vellum, it's madness to the madness with no method.