Questions about 9.16

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by lizarddreaming

Again, my apologies, I've never been on these kinds of forums before and wasn't sure how to do the "code" block inside a post. Is it the # icon in the ribbon?

Yes. That allows code to show up like this:

This is an example of code.

Originally Posted by lizarddreaming

I dunno. It's how I've done 9 previous books. Dump in, split at sections, proceed with formatting. Book View, other than losing the italics formatting, makes very nice cleaned up HTML out of Word docs.

[...] is almost as clean as the BookView clean up (maybe BookView could live on as a clean up plugin because thus far, it's been the best at making very workable HTML from Word, again minus the lack of keeping formatting intact).

That wasn't Book View's intent, that was just a "happy" side effect of copying/pasting in there.

It's a giant step above Word's horrible HTML, but there are better and more reliable conversion methods out there.

Originally Posted by lizarddreaming

I like staying up to date, if possible. I'm proceeding with the current project at 9.14 but am willing to upgrade if there's an advantage. What are the technical advantages to the new engine? (aside from the interface that we've been discussing).

Book View has been a very buggy and maintenance mess for a long time.

Not too get too technical, but Sigil uses this large program called Qt to display the GUI and code (similar to a web browser). Qt has been updating/changing its own guts, which has made it incompatible with Sigil's Book View.

Diap and Kevin have been bandaiding over these Qt<->Book View bugs for a long time, but it has reached a point where it is HELL, so they finally decided to cut the cord.

Doing this will make maintaining Sigil much easier, as they won't have to be wasting time on all those bandaids, and can spend more time making Sigil better and more stable than it already is.

Originally Posted by lizarddreaming

Thanks again for all the suggestions, the new plugin seems to work very well and the new project is proceeding much faster due to not having to hunt down all the italics! That alone is worth it.

Nice.

And learn how to use Styles!

And teach that author how to use Styles too! Even if they use Pages, it has similar functionality:

Pages for Mac: Intro to paragraph styles
Pages for Mac: Create, rename, or delete paragraph styles in a Pages document

All the Styles logic should be pretty similar across Word/LibreOffice/Pages, it's just the steps are slightly different.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

And learn how to use Styles!

And teach that author how to use Styles too! Even if they use Pages, it has similar functionality:

Pages for Mac: Intro to paragraph styles
Pages for Mac: Create, rename, or delete paragraph styles in a Pages document

All the Styles logic should be pretty similar across Word/LibreOffice/Pages, it's just the steps are slightly different.

And once a set of styles is created - in a template - they can be reused by attaching a template to a document. In Word my frequently used styles have keyboard shortcuts - otherwise I can select, point and click.



That set of styles is the default template from MS Word 2016 - its a good place to start.

BR

[Notjohn]

@Lizard: you might try Word2CleanHtml dot Com online. I've used it for years with never a hiccup.

[KevinH]

We have also added code to PageEdit to clean up pastes from Word that use lots of long html comments, styles tags in the body, and o: prefixed p tags.

This leaves pretty clean xhtml at the end.

This is still in the testing stage, and I hope to make it a user preference setting for the next Version of PageEdit.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by lizarddreaming

Okay, wrote a very long reply and the system logged me out while writing it.

The gist being that pasting into Book View and pasting into PageEdit is NOT the same.

<snipped for brevity>

And 363 pages are crammed into one giant block closed out with a paragraph tag (and a styles list code at the end).

As to Styles in Word, the author writes on Pages, sends to me, I put it into Word and format for the print version, then after proof, I dump into Sigil. He doesn't know Styles (because he uses Pages) and I hate Word, so I don't know Styles either. I'll have to look into it, after this book, if it would help.

I will try some of the suggested plugins. Because even if I were to stick with 9.14, I still need a good way to not have to re-add the formatting because that sucks a lot.

Thanks to everyone for your suggestions and responses!

Firstly--as others have already mentioned, of course, Pages has Styles and Headings. Every, every, word processor in the universe has them, under various names. I can tell you, though, that it's unlikely that your client will ever learn them. Not one out of 100 of our clients ever bothers, even though it would save them countless hours.

Secondly--if you're cleaning up the file in Word and, presumably, using Styles and headings in so doing, why aren't you simply exporting the file as filtered HTML and then putting it into Sigil? Rather than pasting plain text and having to add in italics, bold, etc.? That's...well.

If you use Styles and Headings, the HTML output file will be squeaky clean. If your output file isn't squeaky clean, you should--as a commercial formatter--be cleaning it, before putting it into Sigil (or when it's in Sigil) so that the crap coding doesn't cause problems in the book, right?

(I just read--you don't know Styles? How on earth are you working with CSS, if you don't? They're the same exact thing! If you're not using Styles, to format this guy's print and eBooks, how the hell ARE you doing this work????)

So, if you don't know how to use Sigil to do that, and you don't know how to use Word's built-in Styles and Headings (which are actually Word's superpower, and if you're not using them, you're wasting a crapload of your time), then clean the exported HTML file in a text editor that works on your Mac, and then dump it into Sigil.

Presumably, you're not simply pasting crap Word code into Sigil and then splitting chapters and calling it an ePUB, so, the easy way is to simply export the STYLED Word doc into HTML and then put that into Sigil. It's the right way to be working on ePUBs, anyway, if you're not already doing that. I guess you're what, creating a Stylesheet, post-facto and assigning the paragraph styles, etc., manually? Geeeze, that's the long way around...

And while Toxaris' plugin is for Windows only, unfortunately, there are other ways of cleaning HTML auto-magically if you're not doing it yourself. I mean... a long, long time ago, I did a book the way you're saying, having to manually add all those italics back, and I swore I'd certainly never do THAT again! That way lies madness.

Hitch

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Firstly--as others have already mentioned, of course, Pages has Styles and Headings. Every, every, word processor in the universe has them, under various names. I can tell you, though, that it's unlikely that your client will ever learn them. Not one out of 100 of our clients ever bothers, even though it would save them countless hours.

Secondly--if you're cleaning up the file in Word and, presumably, using Styles and headings in so doing, why aren't you simply exporting the file as filtered HTML and then putting it into Sigil? Rather than pasting plain text and having to add in italics, bold, etc.? That's...well.

I've seen code form Word where it would have been very much easier to add back in the formatting by hand. The code from Word was that bad.

I agree that not many people use styles and for making an eBook, that is important. You write your book, send it off to be converted to an eBook. The person making the eBook spends a long time fixing it and converting and gets it looking good. Then you g and make a number of changes in different places and you send the file over to again be converted. You are then making it a reall hardship for the person making your eBook as that person has to (once again) recreate the eBook from your mess. That's not being nice at all.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

I've seen code form Word where it would have been very much easier to add back in the formatting by hand. The code from Word was that bad.

I agree that not many people use styles and for making an eBook, that is important. You write your book, send it off to be converted to an eBook. The person making the eBook spends a long time fixing it and converting and gets it looking good. Then you g and make a number of changes in different places and you send the file over to again be converted. You are then making it a reall hardship for the person making your eBook as that person has to (once again) recreate the eBook from your mess. That's not being nice at all.

Yes, but Wolfie, the FORMATTTER damn sure should be using Styles, if s/he is not using CSS!!!!

I mean, if not...daaaayaaam.

Hitch

[odamizu]

I have an atrocious Word Doc that resulted from scanning a paper book, and this thread encouraged me to finally attempt to convert it into an epub.

The DocXImport plugin was perfect (thank you DiapDealer!), but I also tried saving the Word Doc as filtered html, which resulted in a lot of crazy in-line styles. I figured I could do a nuclear search/replace to clean it up, but my regex skills are weak.

<p.*?> picked up this:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.15in;line-height:13.1pt;background:white'>

but missed this:

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:26.3pt;margin-right:.25pt;margin-bottom:
0in;margin-left:1.7pt;margin-bottom:.0001pt;text-align:justify;text-justify:
inter-ideograph;text-indent:11.15pt;line-height:12.95pt;background:white'>

As I said, the DocXImport solved my problem by blasting away all the crazy styling, but I would really like to learn why my regex failed and what would work instead.

Help, please, thank you!

[jbacelar]

The only thing that occurs to me is that the "rebel" text is not in a single line.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by odamizu

As I said, the DocXImport solved my problem by blasting away all the crazy styling, but I would really like to learn why my regex failed and what would work instead.

Help, please, thank you!

If you check the DotAll option, the regex should work.

Alternatively, you should be able to use:

<p[^>]+>

without checking the DotAll option.

[odamizu]

Ahhhh!

Thank you Doitsu and jbacelar for supporting the "oda is trying to understand regex even though it makes her brain curl up in a fetal ball and whimper" project. I am making slow but steady progress

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by odamizu

Ahhhh!

Thank you Doitsu and jbacelar for supporting the "oda is trying to understand regex even though it makes her brain curl up in a fetal ball and whimper" project. I am making slow but steady progress

Just remember to do a sanity roll every now and then when you think you have finally wrapped your mind around regex.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by DNSB

... when you think you have finally wrapped your mind around regex.

Well, I don't think that's ever going to happen

Trying to grasp the difference between using .*? vs [^>]+>

I get that .*? is limited to a single line, whereas [^>]+> isn't, and that's what messed me up here. But are there other advantages to using the [^x]+x construction over .*?

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by odamizu

I get that .*? is limited to a single line, whereas [^>]+> isn't, and that's what messed me up here. But are there other advantages to using the [^x]+x construction over .*?

In plain English:

#1: [^>]+ = Any character that's NOT a '>' 1 or more times.

#2: .* = ANYTHING 0 or more times.

Note: The '?' at the end makes it "less greedy". So it tries to match the least amount.

So, what #1 is saying is:

Is the next character a '>'? No? Keep going until you hit a '>'.
If you hit the end of a line, keep going.

What #2 is saying is:

Is this anything? Yes? Keep going until you hit a '>'.
If you hit the end of a line, stop.

There are some advantages either method, but if you don't know enough about Regex, it'll probably just confuse you.

Just know that Regex #1 would be "less dangerous", and #2 could potentially be much more dangerous. Sometimes you accidentally Replace All and big chunks of your text got deleted because of some weird edge case. :P

Edit: Actually mixed up some explanations.

[DiapDealer]

The main difference is that <p[^>]+> will never get "greedy" no matter what kind of regex engine or settings might be being used. Whereas <p.*?> is inherently greedy and can include more than you want.

It's just generally considered a bit universally safer when trying to limit your match to within a single html element. It will never cross the single tag boundary.

Try your original regex <p.*?> on the following markup for example:

<p><span class="rule_24">The Everyman’s</span> description</p>

EDIT: What @Tex2002ans said... with an example.