Compatibility of Sigil coding on different ebook apps

[slowsmile]

Just run the above plugin cleaner on your epub. Then have a look at the difference in the html code and stylesheet. The plugin is reasonably thorough. I would also make sure to run Doitsu's Epubcheck plugin(another Sigil plugin) after the clean-out to ensure that you have an IDPF-validated and usable epub with no other problems.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by blackrock36

Hitch,
I based the original document format on the Smashwords style guide where all extraneous formatting in Word is recommended to be removed and the 4 or 5 dedicated styles used were made in Word for quotes, bullet points and the Word defaults were ignored. So the original book document, of which the reproduced text is a sample chapter from the book accurately reflects the Word output including the styles I created as I am familiar with Word. I can assure you that at over 400 A4 pages, I put in a lot of work on formatting the Word document as required with no added stuff so it would render as well as possible. For the book, the Smashwords online reader reproduces the book exactly as formatted as looks great but their epub rendering does not.

However, it seems that I have not learnt enough and I can see from your own and others helpful comments that I still have some way to go on this! I will retry Calibre using a docx format straight to epub and check it out and perhaps acknowledge that I have to educate myself on html too. I also write quiz books under a pseudonym so this whole process will serve me well into the future.

Cheers,
Andy

Andy:

Sorry, didn't mean to be overly negative about your book. Honest to crap, I'm damned if I can figure out how the hell you got all that cruft in the book, if you were following the Smashwords "style guide." I mean, don't get me wrong, I believe you, but most of that *&^%$ should have been nuked.

Did you remove all the styling, first, end-to-end, before you did the new styling? Using remove all, or any such sort of thing? (Anyone of you guys have an idea, how the hell he got that CSS in there? I mean, following Mark's Guide?)

I see that someone recommended Toxaris' plugin and that really is a wonderful, wonderful tool.

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

2. Your HTML code contains inline styles and your stylesheets contain MS Word specific attributes, which can cause all kinds of problems. You might want to rethink your workflow. For example, you could use Toxaris's MS Word Add-in or save your book as a .docx file and convert it to an epub file with Calibre.

I second this. This is the best dang tool out there for DOCX->EPUB. Strips out the cruft, and leaves you with very minimal/clean HTML+CSS. If you've used Word Styles, your classes should carry over as well.

Side Note: blackrock36, you did mention this is a Non-Fiction book. One bug with Toxaris's EPUB Tools is that italics in actual Word footnotes doesn't carry over (this will be fixed in the next major EPUB Tools update). So depending on how extensive your formatting in footnotes is, you may have to do use another tool/method.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Honest to crap, I'm damned if I can figure out how the hell you got all that cruft in the book, if you were following the Smashwords "style guide." I mean, don't get me wrong, I believe you, but most of that *&^%$ should have been nuked.

If this was true:

Originally Posted by blackrock36

The document started life as a .doc and was saved as an .HTML to import in Sigil.

... that it was originally a DOC, there could've been a ton of hidden Word cruft all over the place.

I can easily imagine some mso-styled mess, especially if copying/pasting from different documents, the internet, Word on Mac<->Windows, etc. etc. And you know how notorious WYSIWYG editors are for hiding lots of nasties under the surface.

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by blackrock36

Pdurrant,
Would open office give me cleaner html or will all word processors add unnecessary code when converting to html?

I'm not an expert in the best way to convert from a Word document. I suspect that the suggestions from others in this thread are probably good. I doubt that just converting to open office will help, as it will faithfully reproduce the styling of the text that's already there.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

If this was true:



... that it was originally a DOC, there could've been a ton of hidden Word cruft all over the place.

I can easily imagine some mso-styled mess, especially if copying/pasting from different documents, the internet, Word on Mac<->Windows, etc. etc. And you know how notorious WYSIWYG editors are for hiding lots of nasties under the surface.

Yes, if you're exporting a file that hasn't been pre-cleaned. But when you nuke everything, style-wise, in a doc file, and then religiously reapply styles, you shouldn't get that crap. He has TWO fonts in a single CSS declaration--that should only happen if/when you have ad hoc styling, do you disagree?

When I was still young (hahahahaha) and experimenting with making eBooks, way back when, I conducted Word-to-HTML/ePUB/MOBI experiments, with styles. When you're devout, you can get a reasonably clean document in Sigil. All that cruft shouldn't be there, that's all I'm saying.

Hitch

[BetterRed]

↑ ↑ ↑ ✔️

I note the OP refers to having a DOC file, that is the pre Word 2007 internal format. Is that what he truly has ?

The 'don't use your word processor as if it were a circa 1930 Remington Portable" rule applies equally to producing a DOC in Word '97 as it does to using Word 2016 and saving as DOCX.

My experience was that converting DOCs was problematic compared to converting DOCX, where I have a choice of tools -- calibre conversion and editor import, Sigil plugins, ePub-Tools etc. Hence the earlier practice of saving as Filtered HTML and bashing that into shape. As I recall most (all) of the mso-blah-blah crap came from inline paragraph styling formatting.

BR

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

↑ ↑ ↑ ✔️

I note the OP refers to having a DOC file, that is the pre Word 2007 internal format. Is that what he truly has ?

The 'don't use your word processor as if it were a circa 1930 Remington Portable" rule applies equally to producing a DOC in Word '97 as it does to using Word 2016 and saving as DOCX.

My experience was that converting DOCs was problematic compared to converting DOCX, where I have a choice of tools -- calibre conversion and editor import, Sigil plugins, ePub-Tools etc. Hence the earlier practice of saving as Filtered HTML and bashing that into shape. As I recall most (all) of the mso-blah-blah crap came from inline paragraph styling formatting.

BR

Dunno, but I cannot tell a lie--honestly, I never saw any real difference. I started out with 2003's doc format and moved up over time to docx, (and we still get doc files, along with WPS, Works, WordPerfect, oo, lo, you-name-it) and I've never seen any huge difference.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Hitch

[BetterRed]

And I must admit that I learnt more about Word within the first 10 weeks of using the 2007 version than I did in the 20 years since I first used it on Xenix. I could never find things in the button bar interface, and the menu's were a complete mystery, they had no rhyme or reason. That could be affecting my perception too.

BR

IMO - this thread should be in the EPUB forum

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

And I must admit that I learnt more about Word within the first 10 weeks of using the 2007 version than I did in the 20 years since I first used it on Xenix. I could never find things in the button bar interface, and the menu's were a complete mystery, they had no rhyme or reason. That could be affecting my perception too.

For me, it was the first time I had to create a big, long, complex document. When I discovered Outline View, (and using heading classes to achieve that), the navigation Pane, cross-referencing...man, that changed EVERYTHING for me.

IMO - this thread should be in the EPUB forum

It seems ever thus, here in the land of Sigil. :-)

Hitch

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Hitch

It seems ever thus, here in the land of Sigil. :-)

Hitch

I can move it. Do you second the request?

[DiapDealer]

They did originally ask about Sigil. As long as things are winding down, I don't mind a little natural thread drift. But if you guys want to keep going, it probably should be moved. No emergency, though.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

They did originally ask about Sigil. As long as things are winding down, I don't mind a little natural thread drift. But if you guys want to keep going, it probably should be moved. No emergency, though.

I always thought it was in the wrong place.
Does Sigil GENERATE the code? Not really.
Does Sigil GENERATE metadata? Just the 'modified by' part, all the rest is done by fill in the (F8) form .

This (and many others posted in 'tools' groups,) are really about EPUB coding rules

[DiapDealer]

You can move it if you like. I don't have the energy.

[theducks]

Moderator Notice
Moved to EPUB since this is more about coding

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by blackrock36

I had no idea that Word put all of that BS into the html code which the other contributors have also pointed out. I just want to write and not work on html code but I guess that Microsoft don't agree!

A Word doc is an html file. An ebook is an html file (well, usually). An e-reader is in essence just a rudimentary web browser.

It upsets people on the MobiRead forums, but I simply paste my Word doc into Word2CleanHtml dot Com online. Then I paste the clean html between the body tags provided by Sigil when I open a new epub2 file. In the heading, I add a link to my style sheet, and of course I add my style sheet to the Styles folder. Then I split Sigil's file into separate chapters and sections. It works beautifully, and rarely do I have to fix a validation problem. I do use the separately downloaded Flight Crew plug-in every thirty minutes or so, and before I upload the finished epub to Draft2Digital, Google Play (that may no longer be necessary, since D2D has Google in beta), and Amazon's KDP platform, I run it through Epub Check. Passing Epub Check is necessary if you hope to have the book accepted by the Apple store.

I understand that Toxaris's Word plug-in does the same thing, though unfortunately it does not work on my machine.