Can't change font or font size in ereaders

[jmacg]

Hi Perkin - I haven't had a chance to get back to this, but you were wondering what the document/original design may have had in it, re font instructions. It was actually a Word file extracted out of the original PageMaker layout I did ten years ago. The Word font was Times New Roman 12 points. I saved it, as instructed in the tutorial, as ‘Web Page Filtered’. I am going to try again, as soon as I have time today. I won’t save it as HTML, but rather save it as pure text. Perhaps that will get around the issue of pre-existing font instructions. I had assumed that saving as ‘Web Page Filtered’ produced a clean file for Sigil to work with. Seems it may not.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by jmacg

I had assumed that saving as ‘Web Page Filtered’ produced a clean file for Sigil to work with. Seems it may not.

You assumed incorrectly. Feel free to complain to Microsoft about Word's poor HTML exporting capabilities, since the "Web Page, Filtered" option, while the best Word has to offer, is still crap.

[jmacg]

Then I should also feel free to complain about the Sigil tutorial. I assumed that Word's "Web Page, Filtered" option did the job adequately, because the Sigil tutorial said to either use that option or do a 'text only' save. The tutorial has no caveat about the quality of Word's "Web Page, Filtered" option. Perhaps it should.

[jmacg]

OK – I inserted a plain text file into Sigil, rather than an HTML file. I had produced the file as plain text via Word and also via Editpad. But when I loaded either file into Sigil, all my special characters, like apostrophes and dashes, were represented as a white questionmarks on black triangles.

How do I stop this happening?

However – I tried cutting and pasting a few pages from Editpad into Sigil, and this preserved the apostrophes etc. I could try this for the full book, but I’d prefer to load the actual file.

The good news is that this short version produced an ePub file that behaved properly in an eBook reader – i.e. I could change fonts and font size. So that’s progress, and it certainly proves Valloric’s point that Word’s HTML export is not to be trusted.

So a plain text file will work, but I would lose special formatting like italics, and, far worse, I would lose indents on the first line of each paragraph.

So ideally I prefer to work with HTML. How can I export a 'cleaner' HTML that's not, for instance, going to specify a fixed font size? I certainly don’t want to tweak code in each of the many chapters in the book. Is there any other Windows word processor that will do a better job? Anyone tried OpenOffice?

[Perkin]

With Word, save out the file as *.rtf, that will preserve most of your formatting.
Then either :
Load into AtlantisWordProcessor, and save as epub,
or
Add the rtf into calibre, convert to epub

Load epub, back into Sigil, and check your formatting/headers etc.

Can you (or anyone) post an epub with a few paragraphs, HTML-exported from word, So I can see if I might be able to make a program to strip most of the 'extra' stuff.

[jmacg]

Originally Posted by Perkin

With Word, save out the file as *.rtf, that will preserve most of your formatting.
Then either :
Load into AtlantisWordProcessor, and save as epub,
or
Add the rtf into calibre, convert to epub

Load epub, back into Sigil, and check your formatting/headers etc.

Can you (or anyone) post an epub with a few paragraphs, HTML-exported from word, So I can see if I might be able to make a program to strip most of the 'extra' stuff.

Thanks for those ideas. I'll try them tomorrow (bedtime Downunder here right now).

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by jmacg

So ideally I prefer to work with HTML. How can I export a 'cleaner' HTML that's not, for instance, going to specify a fixed font size?

Just use Word's filtered HTML export option and then remove the CSS style rules that specify font sizes. It takes like 10 seconds to do so.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by jmacg

OK – I inserted a plain text file into Sigil, rather than an HTML file. I had produced the file as plain text via Word and also via Editpad. But when I loaded either file into Sigil, all my special characters, like apostrophes and dashes, were represented as a white questionmarks on black triangles.

How do I stop this happening?

However – I tried cutting and pasting a few pages from Editpad into Sigil, and this preserved the apostrophes etc. I could try this for the full book, but I’d prefer to load the actual file.

The good news is that this short version produced an ePub file that behaved properly in an eBook reader – i.e. I could change fonts and font size. So that’s progress, and it certainly proves Valloric’s point that Word’s HTML export is not to be trusted.

So a plain text file will work, but I would lose special formatting like italics, and, far worse, I would lose indents on the first line of each paragraph.

PLAIN TEXT
You are confused if you think you can see any special formatting (in the editor) , it uses just those 127 characters that appear in the ASCII chart .

Notepad is a plain text editor. No Bold, Italics, or underline...
As a matter, there is nothing about the file that even tells what codepage was used to generate it.

HTML is a plain text based Mark-up language. (Word and others are marked up, just not in plain text). Only basic ASCII is permitted, all else is codeded to obtain.
As others suggested: xport as Filtered HTML, That uses an internal converter to translate internal markup to HTML. WYSI (in the source) not always WYG (in the rendered HTML)

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by jmacg

OK – I inserted a plain text file into Sigil, rather than an HTML file. I had produced the file as plain text via Word and also via Editpad. But when I loaded either file into Sigil, all my special characters, like apostrophes and dashes, were represented as a white questionmarks on black triangles.

For TXT files, make sure the file is encoded in UTF-8.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Valloric

You assumed incorrectly. Feel free to complain to Microsoft about Word's poor HTML exporting capabilities, since the "Web Page, Filtered" option, while the best Word has to offer, is still crap.

Actually I keep a copy of Word 98 and its other tools around for that purpose. It is the best for export Word, Excel, etc. After that they got carried away with trying to emulate the exact look of the word document.

Dale

[jmacg]

Originally Posted by theducks

PLAIN TEXT
You are confused if you think you can see any special formatting (in the editor) , it uses just those 127 characters that appear in the ASCII chart .

I saw what I saw! Screengrab attached.

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by jmacg

I saw what I saw! Screengrab attached.

I can't speak for others, but I believed you saw it the first time you said so. Your file was most likely encoded in windows-1251; just encode it in UTF-8 (or UTF-16) as I've mentioned and it will import just fine.

[jmacg]

Thanks Valloric - I'll bear that in mind for text imports. In the meantime I'm working to get an HTML solution, because that will preserve formatting and save me a lot of time. I have a few things to try that have been suggested by you and others and I'm starting on them now. I've just done an demo ePub file as requested by Perkin and I will upload it in the next few minutes.

[jmacg]

Originally Posted by Perkin

Can you (or anyone) post an epub with a few paragraphs, HTML-exported from word, So I can see if I might be able to make a program to strip most of the 'extra' stuff.

Hi Perkin - I've had a frustrating time trying to produce a short test file for you. I have attached one, but it's actually behaving OK re fonts/font scaling, when read on iBooks. And I can’t tell whether it’s giving the ‘usual’ problems in either Kobo or Stanza. It’s appearing in them as blank pages. Darned if I know why. Maybe both those readers expect something with more pages.

I did, this morning, load the full version of my original problem book into iBooks for the first time. Damned thing behaved perfectly! Yet the exact same file still has the fonts/font scaling issues I've been talking about, in Kobo and Stanza.

Let me know what you make of the trial file that's attached to this post. Incidentally, I answered 'Yes' in the dialogue box that came up in Word 2003 when I saved as Web Page Filtered. This dialgue is also attached to this post.

I'll have a go at your initial ‘save from Word as RTF’ suggestion this afternoon.

[jmacg]

Originally Posted by Perkin

With Word, save out the file as *.rtf, that will preserve most of your formatting.
Then either :
Load into AtlantisWordProcessor, and save as epub,
or
Add the rtf into calibre, convert to epub

Load epub, back into Sigil, and check your formatting/headers etc.

Done the RTF/Calibre thing now. Mixed success.

On Stanza it was perfect.
On iBooks, I could change and scale fonts, but for some reason, at the start of each chapter, the text in the first paragraph was scrunched up. The only thing that was different about those paragraphs was that there was no first-line indent in the RTF file. The other paras all started with an indent. I had made sure in the original Word file that all the letter spacings were set at normal.
On Kobo it again just delivered blank pages.