How are e-books created?

[DaleDe]

Hay, a long time ago Word standardized Word 97 as an exchange format. Just save every file as Word 97 and you're all set

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Hay, a long time ago Word standardized Word 97 as an exchange format. Just save every file as Word 97 and you're all set

Dale:

Oh, yeah, I know..but there seems to be a conspiracy of "I don't want to learn to use..." amongst Works users. My experiences are that the Works files we receive seem, generally (not always, of course) to be worse in terms of how much cleanup is required than Word files. But we get the gamut here...we get some Pages files that would make one take up drinking, as well. {shrug}. (And Scrivener, and RTF's from who-knows-what, and ....)

Hitch

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Dale:

Oh, yeah, I know..but there seems to be a conspiracy of "I don't want to learn to use..." amongst Works users. My experiences are that the Works files we receive seem, generally (not always, of course) to be worse in terms of how much cleanup is required than Word files. But we get the gamut here...we get some Pages files that would make one take up drinking, as well. {shrug}. (And Scrivener, and RTF's from who-knows-what, and ....)

Hitch

Agreed, but that is not specific to any particular version or tool. There seems to be a lot of people that use a word processor like a typewriter with no regard to the use of styles or anything else that is standard. It sort of looks ok at first glance but is trash underneath. Hence the infinite monkeys.

Dale

[mrmikel]

And if you are in a zen koan mood: Why??????????

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Not infinite, but take it from someone who really DOES know: entirely too freaking many!!!

(Jon, I seem to be following you around today.)

Hitch

I've got a stalker.

And none of them compatible with any other program.

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

This all assumes of course that they don't simply use the PDF because that is what they used to do, and never mind they have a perfectly good .docx

We'll set aside the discussion on whether such a thing as a "perfectly good .docx" can exist. :-)

[twowheels]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Agreed, but that is not specific to any particular version or tool. There seems to be a lot of people that use a word processor like a typewriter with no regard to the use of styles or anything else that is standard. It sort of looks ok at first glance but is trash underneath. Hence the infinite monkeys.

A great book, the title of which was more appropriate when the first edition was released.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mac-Not-Ty.../dp/0201782634

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by twowheels

A great book, the title of which was more appropriate when the first edition was released.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Mac-Not-Ty.../dp/0201782634

Looks like a good read. There is also a PC is not a typewriter http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewri...2313058&sr=1-9

Dale

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

Looks like a good read. There is also a PC is not a typewriter http://www.amazon.com/Pc-Not-Typewri...2313058&sr=1-9

Dale

I should buy those by the bushel and give them out as "welcome aboard" books.

Eh...maybe not! ;-)

Hitch

[dgatwood]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Not infinite, but take it from someone who really DOES know: entirely too freaking many!!!

So what you're saying is that there's at least one.

Originally Posted by Hitch

But we get the gamut here...we get some Pages files that would make one take up drinking, as well. {shrug}.

Wait, there's another kind of Pages file? Without twenty different styles that are all identical, but for some reason get emitted as separate CSS classes with names that are little more than random line noise?

I've come to the conclusion that there are only two types of HTML output from WYSIWYG editors: bad and worse. There's a reason I gave up, spent hours debugging WebKit's HTML editing support, and wrote my own minimalistic DocBook XML editor using WebKit as a rendering engine.

Of course, it's semi-WYSIWYG, but at least there's a clearly defined tree that you can muck with arbitrarily, with element boundaries clearly shown in the rendered view.