[Hitch]

Originally Posted by rodneylives

Yeah yeah sure. Thing is though:

1. When I write in some word processor and paste into Sigil, which I imagine is using it as intended,

Actually, no, you're not. What would be the difference between doing that, and just typing in Sigil's BookView? (Diap: another nail....)

I'm likely to drag in that WP's own cruft along with it. I write in Sigil because I'm not really sure what workflow will result in the cleanest code, other than just doing it in Notepad++. I know from experience that Word and Windows Scrivener (which is basically an RTF editor with extra stuff added in) are not great for this. Any suggestions for this? What do you guys use?

Well, honestly? I use Word. Bear in mind--I'm not an author. My business makes eBooks. From, in large part, Word files.

The hoohah about Word's cruft is grossly--grossly--overstated. If someone understands EITHER Word's built-in Styles and Headings, or same in CSS, Word can be used to produce VERY clean HTML. I do it all the time.

What Word (and Scrivener) do put out is utter cruft when someone just types along and creates ad hoc styles. NO word processor, none, zip, zein, zilch, does that well and then doesn't create cruft. By and large, all of them operate on your basic, simple, computer principle: GIGO. Whether it's Scrivener, Word, Pages, Ywriter, etc. If someone can't take a few minutes to learn Word--their own tool--then, yes, they get garbage out that has to be cleaned, top to bottom.

But even then--unless the user is hopelessly lost--the cruft isn't that hard to clean. I've seen some doozies, god knows, but almost all of them are cleanable very quickly. I'd strongly--strongly--recommend that you take a look at Toxaris' ePUBTools. Works a treat to clean Word files and output clean HTML.

What we do is either output the Word file to HTML, which we then clean in an HTML editor which exists for the purpose (I use NoteTab Pro, which about half of us do; the other half prefer Epsilon, which is a programmer's editor) or, we go directly from the Word output to Sigil. It depends on the cleanliness, or lack thereof, of the Word file. Once the HTML is cleaned, we put that cleaned HTML file into Sigil and finish it up. That, to my mind, is the best use of Sigil. It is, after all, not an HTML editor--it's an ePUB editor, yes?

2. I don't see how even its intended use case is helped by randomly choosing whether to add a <p> or a <div> when typing in Book View. I'm sure there's some distinguishing feature, something I'm doing that's causing one to happen instead of the other, but darn if I know what it is. (If I knew what it was, I could avoid it. That'd probably be the best scenario actually, figuring out what I'm doing that triggers it....)

I seriously doubt that it's randomly choosing to add a p or div. It's adding it based on what it is YOU are doing, in BookView. As I can't see what you're doing, it's nearly impossible to tell. But you may be doing something that requires a div, versus a p. Without more information, it's impossible to tell.

Diap and Kevin are the experts here, by a long patch. They maintain and improve the Sigil Code. Others, too (if I've omitted someone, my sincere apologies). Folks like Doits create plugins that enhance it. I'm simply a user thereof.

If you can tell us--or show us--where you've done X that added a p, and Y that added a div, we can probably--probably--shed some light on the subject.

However, back to your initial point: you really oughtn't use Sigil as a Word processor. Unless you're writing in code/markup, it's a bit counterproductive.

Hitch