css question

[GrannyGrump]

@ Hitch, well said.

As a hobbyist / enthusiast, I am most grateful for wisdom and hard-earned knowledge shared by gurus, but certainly don't expect it as an entitlement.
Just because someone knows how to do something, doesn't mean they have to provide a how-to to any and all comers.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by grannyGrumpy

@ Hitch, well said.

As a hobbyist / enthusiast, I am most grateful for wisdom and hard-earned knowledge shared by gurus, but certainly don't expect it as an entitlement.
Just because someone knows how to do something, doesn't mean they have to provide a how-to to any and all comers.

Well, there's a lot of gurus around here--I'm not one of them, but I do have a few years of experience. Most of what I know about CSS, for example, I learrned from real gurus--Jellby, who rocks him some CSS; Capidamonte, who taught me not to mistake styling for structure, or vice-versa, and Liz Castro, whose book on ePUB taught me about thinking outside the box, in dealing with Apple.

Toxaris can make Word sing like a Bird, and his clean HTML macro is wondrous...I could go on. We're very fortunate at MR--we have an amazing amount of brain-power here, and reasonably decent, fruitful and intelligent discussion. And those true Gurus can do whatever they want with their expertise. My post wasn't as much about sharing information as it was about presumption. And I thank you for your post!

@cybmole:

BWAHAHAHA.

I thought everybody knew that? Those bracket thingies hold in all the TEXT, so it doesn't get lost. Man, how long you say you been making these books here? Um..lemme see, I think we say that we charge about $2.50 a PAIR for those, but it usually works about at about $0.00001 a pair. ;-)

But if you're smart, you can only use one pair of those, and use a bunch of those BR things, which are FREE, and save yourself some money. I get my brackets from Amazon, in bulk, although someone told me that they were cheaper at Costco.



Hitch

[mrmikel]

I get mine at bracketswholesale.com on line!

[DiapDealer]

I'm in the market for a new bracket supplier. The price is right (from my current supplier) but the quality has really gone downhill. Not enough strength in the vertices, I think. After very little time, gravity take its toll and they collapse into what looks like really fat underscores.

[Perkin]

When first starting out with editing html, I had the good fortune of acquiring a breeding pair, and have consequently had no need to buy any for a considerable amount of time.

The original pair have now withered slightly due to old age and are more like {}.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Perkin

When first starting out with editing html, I had the good fortune of acquiring a breeding pair, and have consequently had no need to buy any for a considerable amount of time.

The original pair have now withered slightly due to old age and are more like {}.

W3C sill lets them validate

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Perkin

When first starting out with editing html, I had the good fortune of acquiring a breeding pair, and have consequently had no need to buy any for a considerable amount of time.

The original pair have now withered slightly due to old age and are more like {}.

OMG, a breeding pair!

Do you have any issues with inbreeding? I had a breeding pair, back when I was young, but we had some inbreeding problems, which caused them to get too pointy in the vertices. (Wow...maybe Diap got some of my inbreds!). Of course, at the breed shows, pointy vertices are a down-mark, so now I only breed for fun. ;-)

Hitch

[mrmikel]

But will they work in iBooks, Hitch?

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

But will they work in iBooks, Hitch?

Of course! Fortunately, at the IDPF shows, Apple has a class all unto itself, as its pairs are usually inbred, and suffer from pointy vertices and UUSD--Utterly Unnecessary Spans Disease. As these things are not compliant with the IDPF Breed Standard, they were granted their own class. (What with all those breeders having so many of those Apple-breds!)

Now, naturally, they're trying to win that class with their homebred iAuthor entries, but fortunately, those are SO inbred, and generally grossly overweight, that I don't see those having a shot at the crown for a while yet.

Hitch,
Breeder of clean spans.
All litters are span-tested for UUSD.

[mrmikel]

I shudder to think what would happen with if they got over to Baen with all their Science Fiction. Alien Mutant Brackets! The Horror. Oh The Humanity!

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by ralphiedee

I had a client send me a powerpoint document that I needed to convert to an epub. So I had to manually copy and paste all 95 pages into word then I converted to html, opened in Sigil took a few pages and assigned a font face with a few styles in Sigil. I need ed to embed font in the epub so I added the font and I was able to manually assign the styles to each paragraph and it looks fine.

Now I need to have the complete book display in the same font

Getting back to the original question:

No you don't. The client has unreasonable expectations, and you've offered him something unrealistic. eBooks, at their current state of development, aren't about font choice. They aren't about a whole lot of layout control. Anything complicated is best treated as a graphic, and you have to accept that the resizing algorithims and screen resolution of many readers will degrade quality a little or a lot.

If you had a Save buffer full of plain text, why on earth did you mangle it through Word and an HTML conversion? Paste it straight into Sigil. Or maybe into Notepad first, to strip out any lingering formatting code. Then add the minimum possible formatting necessary to make the information readable on a monochrome 5" screen. Which isn't much!

[exaltedwombat]

Originally Posted by Hitch

If I may, I'd like to ask what you do for a living?

Good question! Few of us have a college-to-retirement career now, we have to see how our particular skill set lines up with opportunity on an almost day-to-day basis. There's a market for eBook conversion/design at present, but it will contract enormously when the "Export as eBook" button in Word, Indesign etc. starts actually producing useable code. It won't be long.

But I don't need to go into detail, because there's one clinching argument. Where would ANY of us be if the developer of Sigil had not made his work freely available? It makes an attitude of secrecy regarding techniques of using the program look rather sad, don't you agree?

[DiapDealer]

This has nothing to do with Sigil... or "secrecy"... or sharing. This is about not going out of one's way to help someone who only takes part in our little community whenever they run into a roadblock in their pursuit of deceiving a "client" with regard to their skill set.

I'm not "helping" anybody to charge someone money for a job they're not qualified to do. Simple as that.

[ElMiko]

I confess to having been following this thread (and others like it) with some interest, finding both sides of the "to-help-or-not-to-help" argument personally compelling. On the one hand Hitch's extended post resonated intellectually with me; professional Darwinism appeals to me as a consumer of all-too-frequently poorly formatted retail ebooks. When I come across one of these disasters, it inevitably leads to a solid 5 or 10 minutes of grumbling and stewing in my own indignation over the fact that someone was actually paid to produce such a shameful product. On the other hand, exaltedwombat's position is one to which i'm instinctively emotionally drawn to. After all, I've relied strongly—indeed, bordering on exclusively—on the generosity of MR's members in sharpening my own amateur ebook-creation skills. The idea that by virtue of being a "professional" one can no longer call on that same said generosity seems to me a bit draconian. After all, is a published author no longer allowed to use a thesaurus because he should already have an encyclopedic knowledge of that particular skill set (vocabulary)?

I wonder if there isn't some happy medium to be found. Whatever the case, I question the value of scolding the less-knowledgable professionals for having the temerity to ask. If you feel morally compelled to withhold your assistance, that is, of course, your prerogative, and—as I said—I certainly can see (and have seen) scenarios on MR in which the exercise of said prerogative would strike me as totally justified. But isn't staying silent enough? Or do you really think that there's any chance at all that by taking to task someone you consider to be a sub-par professional, he will suddenly repent of his sins, contact his client, and cancel his contract? Or more likely, will he just open a new account under a new name and remember never to mention the fact that he's being financially compensated?

[cybmole]

quote "I had a client send me a powerpoint document ..... So I had to manually copy and paste all 95 pages into word "

what ??? RTFM. or press that button labelled F1 now & again. hint - look up outline view

better still - find a more suitable trade - computer geek you are not