Question for those who edit .CSS files

[Mr_H_Poirot]

I confess I, like a previous poster, have an obsessive personality. Were I to go down this rabbit hole I fear I would become quite absolutist about this

Although 15-30 mins is a lot, lot less than I was expecting

[Mr_H_Poirot]

I'd be quite interested to see a video recorded of someone editing a CSS of a Gutenberg book in Sigil. I will search on Youtube, there must be one there

[Sirtel]

Personally I use the calibre editor, not Sigil (solely because it's what I'm used to).

[Mr_H_Poirot]

When I marked the chapter titles as headings and created the TOC in my split ebook (which I realise is very low level css editing) I looked up in gemini how to do it and I had instructions for calibre or sigil. Sigil seemed a bit 'nicer' to use for it in terms of UI although I suspect, like everything, it's' what you get used to that matters

[Sirtel]

Yeah. I've rarely used Sigil, because I'm far more used to the calibre editor and it's easier to do everything in a single program. But both will do the job.

Calibre also has a very convenient and easy to use TOC editor, which I've used often. No idea how it compares to Sigil.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by icallaci

I've run across ebooks where the publisher sometimes uses bare tags and sometimes uses a class with the same properties as the bare tags. So I don't know if <p> and <p class="indent"> do the same thing unless I set it myself. I want everything, and I do mean everything, to use a class with a name that tells me what it does. If I decide to change what "indent" does, it's not any harder than going to the CSS and editing the <p> tag. Plus, I find my code looks better if every tag tells me specifically what it does. Simple to me means consistent. If other <p> tags have classes (for nonindented, blockquoted, centered, hanging, etc.), then ALL my <p> tags have classes. Simple and consistent. Works for me.

Edited to add: Plus, I don't have to "remember" anything. The name of the class tells me its basic function. The less I have to remember these days, the better.

It's trivial to remember. You just do. Plus the code is so much neater and simpler. I see no reason to have <p="someclassyoudonoteverneed"> instead of <p>.

[theducks]

I touchup all CSS. I use BOTH Calibre and Sigil because each does tasks that match the way I work. (only for personal use). I get rid of odd line-height (Other than 1.2), Spans that only set font to 1em, (and remove general use forced color black and white ).

There are things that Kobo kepubs barf on that I comment out (a saved search). letter spacing runs words together, Min-height 12em assume high res tablets?, I shrink that to 6. Those I run as a grouped S&R on the CSS, 30 seconds.

A generally clean book takes about 5 minutes to make it 'my way'.

The is the saved searches and clips (reused code) that get frequently used.

I tend to use the Built in code verify of Calibre Editor as my first step to clean coding type issues.

Then I switch to Sigil for the basic cleanup edits (saved search). OCR'd books need the most work putting split words back, marking headings for auto TOC generation)

[icallaci]

Lol, I'm glad it works for you. For me, it is not trivial to remember. If I see <p>, I have to remember how it differs from every other <p> in the book. If I see <p class="indent"> it tells me what I want to know. Nice try, but you won't convince me.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It's trivial to remember. You just do. Plus the code is so much neater and simpler. I see no reason to have <p="someclassyoudonoteverneed"> instead of <p>.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by icallaci

Lol, I'm glad it works for you. For me, it is not trivial to remember. If I see <p>, I have to remember how it differs from every other <p> in the book. If I see <p class="indent"> it tells me what I want to know. Nice try, but you won't convince me.

Jon's method is fine as it represents the BASE usage (usually indented) of the work. Everything else is the exception.
<p class="FP">, <p class="right">
I tend to think inherent default usage.
Tristate logic (not set = Not determined or Pass ,fail), #read date=done, nothing (to be read)
A null can represent something. A Lean, mean Data Machine

[Mr_H_Poirot]

5 mins is very quick, but then I guess you are very experienced.

I confess to having got intrigued. I'm not going to start editing all my ebooks but I have got some short pdfs that I may convert into epubs just to play around

[Sirtel]

Originally Posted by Mr_H_Poirot

I confess to having got intrigued. I'm not going to start editing all my ebooks but I have got some short pdfs that I may convert into epubs just to play around

Don't. PDF conversions are almost always very poor. It's nearly impossible to convert PDF to any other format and have the result look good.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Mr_H_Poirot

5 mins is very quick, but then I guess you are very experienced.

I confess to having got intrigued. I'm not going to start editing all my ebooks but I have got some short pdfs that I may convert into epubs just to play around

Converted PDF can be a mess. And while you can fix up some of the mess with regex, there are things you can never fix without doing a full A/B comparison. That means every word, every space, every punctuation, even style, every single thing.

You won't learn much from a PDF conversion. Use retail ePub as your source to try out editing.

[JSWolf]

A couple of thing I left out. I fix em dashes so they have no space around them. And I convert en dashes to em dashes. Also, ellipses I make sure there is no space around them, Also, if the ellipses are not using the ellipse character, I convert to that.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by Mr_H_Poirot

So if you take an average 300 page novel that you've got from say Gutenberg or from Amazon, how long does it take you to make your changes? I can't work out if some of you are spending a couple of hours per book or if it's quicker?

For the average book, it takes about 5 minutes since most of the heavy lifting is done by my automation/saved search collection. Some books take longer but I give myself a 15 minute time limit—if it is going to take longer than that, I will often do a nuke and default.

I also cleanup some books for a couple of local authors though after teaching them how to use styles in their word processor, the input books are now a lot cleaner.

[icallaci]

Interesting discussion. My cleanup routine takes about 15 minutes per book on average. My rule of thumb for tags and classes has always been: if the default behavior of a tag does what I want, then I leave it alone. If I want to change the default behavior, then I define a class. Since the default behavior of <p> is non-indented, I define a class for indented paragraphs. Hearing other viewpoints and the reasons behind them is thought-provoking.