Importing Open Office HTML in Sigil

[pietvo]

What I have done a couple of times is: convert the HTML to ePub with Calibre and then do the touchup with Sigil.

[roger64]

Thank you all for your information and advice.

There is a really steep learning curve here which will keep me busy for some time, I'm afraid, because all the books published by me on MobileRead have been in PDF format so far (though I did a not too glorious epub try recently).

I did not expect epub and/or Sony to be so touchy about fonts in so widespread use like Times New Roman.

As far as "open" fonts are concerned, I personnally dislike Liberation fonts even if many people recommend them and will stick to TNR (though I know that the following free one has about exactly the same metrics as TNR)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimbus_Roman_No9_L

The "no soft hyphen" limitation is a serious practical drawback too.

So now...



To conclude, I thought there is some truth in pietvo's comment. Calibre and Sigil seems to be complementing each other. If it can be of any help, this is what a random user found with the attached file:

I found only one drawback common to both calibre and Sigil (so, probably stemming from the original file), small images are NOT centered (Sigil can correct it)

Beginning with calibre

Pros:
has a workaround for soft hyphens (no question marks)
can split your file automatically in 260k chunks
can process directly from an odt file (Sigil needs a xhtml export)

Cons
provides a substitution font for TNR (without serif) (Sigil can correct it)
provides you with a cover page, like it or not
footnotes entries are too big (Sigil's are nicer)
need for "manually" implementing TOC (adding //h:h1 and so on)

Beginning with Sigil

Has the opposite pros and cons.

[paulpeer]

Originally Posted by roger64

The "no soft hyphen" limitation is a serious practical drawback too.

It's not only a pain in Sony. Almost every system I tested had problems. The glorious exceptions, that treat soft hyphens as they should, are Ibis, Bookworm and EPUBReader. Other systems truncate the words properly, but show no hyphen. Other systems show a hyphen always, even in the middle of a line. And other systems completely stop showing text, when they reach the first soft hyphen ...