Tables in ePub

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, I know, I sound like a MSFT commercial for Word. Trust me, I'm not--but it frustrates me that people get so stymied with Word. Typically--and this may not be your instance, i freely admit--it's because they've never taken a few hours to genuinely learn what's at the heart of it.

Yep. When I got frustrated with all the horrible documents I was getting, I blamed Word.

All throughout school, I got taught and used it all wrong (Direct Formatting)... and everyone I ever knew used Word that crappy way too. And every time the document exploded? I blamed Word.

When I finally decided to mess around with Word, professionally, a few years ago (mostly because of your highest of praises for Toxaris's EPUBTools)... I actually spent ~30 minutes learning Styles from those 2 tutorial videos.

I exported as "Clean HTML"—expecting the usual disaster I read about on forums (and saw) for years. Nope, everything turned out relatively clean.

That's the day you won me over.

(And I couldn't believe how many years I wasted... solved in less than an hour.)

* * *

Then when I saw how amazing Toxaris's tools were—just like you said—that's the day I added Microsoft Word as an integral part of my conversion toolkit.

• Finereader cleanup?
  
  • Nothing better than EPUBTools.
• Checking for “mismatching“ or “missing quotes?
  
  • Nothing better than EPUBTools.
• Need more spellchecking/grammarchecking?
  
  • Doesn't hurt to have an alternate checking stage. (Different tools catch different errors.)
    
• Need to clean up someone's mess?
  
  • You can Select > Select All Text With Similar Formatting, then correct the bulk of their busted formatting -> Styles very quickly.
    
  • I wish LibreOffice had that. It makes it so much easier to fix documents. (Especially files from Google Docs.)
    
  • Note: LibreOffice currently requires a much more cumbersome F&R method.
    
• Comparing 2 documents to see the differences?
  
  • Word is pretty great.
• [...]

This is what I was talking about with unique pros/cons for every format/method/program.

When I took the entire ebook-making process into account, Word slotted itself in there in a few key situations.

(Just like using spreadsheet programs for complex tables!!! )

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

• You can Select > Select All Text With Similar Formatting, then correct the bulk of their busted formatting -> Styles very quickly.
  
• I wish LibreOffice had that. It makes it so much easier to fix documents. (Especially files from Google Docs.)
  
  

LO sort of has format based searches. If I really needed Word, I can use Word 2007 on Wine (or Word XP or Word 2003 on VMs). Word 2003 is best for WINE.

But I've not had to use MS Word since about 2014 or 2015.

I've tried various plug-ins/Export tools for epub on Word & Writer and all all inferior to SaveAs docx and import to Calibre.

I've not looked at Word2003 or Word2007 HTML export, but Word XP (even with styles) is horrid HTML compared to LO Writer 5.x - 6.x, however since I switched from Mobi Creator to Calibre I never use HTML export.

The PDF export on some versions of Word is an option MS plug-in which seems to have vanished. But the PDF export on Writer 5.x and 6.x seems perfect. MS Word PDF export sometimes on plug in on Word XP didn't do correct page breaks.

If you have to deal with other people's Word docs a lot, then MS Word may be best. If you don't have to do that, then LO Writer styles, windows, headings, page styles and templates are certainly better than Word 2.0a, Word from Office 4.3, Office 95, Word XP, Word 2003 & Word 2007. I usually have style & outline windows to left of main doc window, a controller above and the Search & Replace below.
I have KATE (tabs like Notepad++, which I used on Windows, then Wine) open to right of main doc, with text files of current annotations, events, timelines, characters etc. A session per project.
I use spreadsheets to track changes/status and make timelines.
Always increment version number before deletion or any new edit. No files called final-Really-final etc.
Separate directories each project. Subdirectories in them for images and research.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Tex2002ans

Yep. When I got frustrated with all the horrible documents I was getting, I blamed Word.

All throughout school, I got taught and used it all wrong (Direct Formatting)... and everyone I ever knew used Word that crappy way too. And every time the document exploded? I blamed Word.

When I finally decided to mess around with Word, professionally, a few years ago (mostly because of your highest of praises for Toxaris's EPUBTools)... I actually spent ~30 minutes learning Styles from those 2 tutorial videos.

I exported as "Clean HTML"—expecting the usual disaster I read about on forums (and saw) for years. Nope, everything turned out relatively clean.

That's the day you won me over.

(And I couldn't believe how many years I wasted... solved in less than an hour.)

You know, I had a bit of an advantage, in a backward way.

I came to eBooks as a hobby first, as y'all know, PG eBooks on an ancient Kindle, etc. How I got there was via Mobipocket, which humorously, Mr. Hitch found for me, because a) the Kindle had been gifted to him, by his sister, not me, and b) he at the time couldn't find any non-fiction books, nearly at all, for him to read on it.

Anyway, I started out with the Word-->MBPC software. I immediately realized that HTML was sorta like Wordperfect (tags!) and when I wanted to tweak something, I could do it inside the HTML.

So...I very early on saw the relationship between Word-->CSS/HTML. Not some act of genius, just...thar she blows! Most of the rest of this crowd, here and the eBook crowd, back in those days, tended to be nerdy and disdain MSFT, so they started out with Markdown, hand-coding, etc. and ePUB. My backdoor into eBooks, commercially, started out with Word, and Word-->HTML so...you know.

* * *

Then when I saw how amazing Toxaris's tools were—just like you said—that's the day I added Microsoft Word as an integral part of my conversion toolkit.

(Some snippage about Toxaris' ePUB tools with which I wholeheartedly agree.)

When I took the entire ebook-making process into account, Word slotted itself in there in a few key situations.

(Just like using spreadsheet programs for complex tables!!! )

Yes, perzackly.

Originally Posted by Quoth

I've not looked at Word2003 or Word2007 HTML export, but Word XP (even with styles) is horrid HTML compared to LO Writer 5.x - 6.x, however since I switched from Mobi Creator to Calibre I never use HTML export.

You know, I believe I may have started with a version of Word that ran on XP and I truly don't remember it being such a problem. I mean, compared to what you can do today, maybe, but the fundies of Word, that Styles=HTML and that you can directly map them if you are so inclined, that's all the same.

The PDF export on some versions of Word is an option MS plug-in which seems to have vanished. But the PDF export on Writer 5.x and 6.x seems perfect. MS Word PDF export sometimes on plug in on Word XP didn't do correct page breaks.

There was, for some years, a deliberate incompatibility, due to a dispute between MSFT and Adobe. That's been resolved for...oh, 5-6 years now or a bit longer? Even their lowest-end PDF export works fine. (And in fact, works better for printing font exemplars directly from my font manager than does an Adobe export!)

If you have to deal with other people's Word docs a lot, then MS Word may be best. (some snippage by Hitch, sorry!)

Actually, if you have to deal with other people's cruft a lot, MS Word+Toxaris's ePUB Tools beats Calibre hands-down. It just does. I cannot tell you what a godsend those tools are, particularly for taking some Ad Hoc nightmare, tagging all the text formatting (local) like bold, italics, etc. and being able to, in one fell swoop, nuke all the other ad hoc formatting. It's ...fantastic.

I had to convince one of my OWN people, who was absolutely insistent that her own PERL program for cleaning files, in HTML, was the bomb. That it did everything. I forget all the details now, but I proved to her that a quick pre-clean, with Tox's ePUBTools and marking the localized text formatting was actually superior to her PERL clips. And it WAS.

Like I said--and I believe I've told the story here more than once--for probably a decade, I was a staunch anti-Word person. Oh, no, Word was terrible, blabbety-blab, WordPerfect was superior (at the time, I say it still was), you couldn't see the codes, OH THE HUMANITY!

But once I stopped trying to force Word to meet my expected behaviors, and all that and sat down and looked at the thought process, etc., behind it--like Tex, took a few minutes and actually learned it--it's quite simple to make it behave. And frankly, today, it's leaps and bounds ahead of WP, for HTML, fersure. I had to recently do a WPerf project, both for print and HTML and god help me, it was a nightmare. No easy way to clean it and on and on.

I don't have some agita about LO. It's a nice, clean program by and large. If memory serves--and it may not!--it has some glaring omissions with which I can't live, and that's why I stick to Word. I mean, personally as well as professionally, where realistically, I don't have a choice. The moment you start dealing in commercial non-fiction books, with footnotes, endnotes, cross-references and index tagging, you can't leave Word or you're doomed.

For example, if you're doing a print book using INDD or almost anything else in creation (no, Tex, I'm not talking about LaTEX, thanks), you desperately need those Word tags, to keep your sanity down the process. Trust me.

(I have a horror story, truly, about a customer, Word, indices and foototes, and *&^%$#@* Google Docs. Three times, his bloody index and x-ref tags disappeared, from the Word files we sent him. Three TIMES. We couldn't figure it out, until we finally asked him HOW he was reviewing, and editing, etc. the returned file. To be clear, this was during a line-edit portion of the work we were doing for him. He finally said "on an iPad" and when I pursued it further, turned out he was BY DEFAULT opening the goddamned files in GDocs and editing them, or even not, but just SAVING them and what happens? Yes, yes, yes, you guessed right--all the tagging, etc. totally disappeared. We redid that book 3x. What a nightmare.)

Hitch

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Quoth

LO sort of has format based searches. [...]

Yes, I wrote detailed LibreOffice instructions in that linked thread. Going from:

• <i>markup</i> -> Formatting
• Formatting -> \emph{markup}
  
  • This was Microsoft Word instructions, but the LO instructions are very similar (see other 2).
• Formatting -> Styles

Word has that functionality sitting in the Advanced Find & Replace as well...

... but Word's "Select all similar formatting" is amazing! Then you don't even have to go digging through all those menus + submenus + select the perfectly correct fonts, etc.

Click the mess you want to change, Find All Similar, press your Style, boom.

Originally Posted by Quoth

I've tried various plug-ins/Export tools for epub on Word & Writer and all all inferior to SaveAs docx and import to Calibre.

Toxaris's EPUBTools is the best.

It also has a fantastic EPUB import functionality.

The best thing is it carries over your HTML classes and maps them to Styles.

- - -

Import Note: One of the only few downsides is EPUB import only carries over the first class:

<p class="poem margintop">

would only get mapped to a single "poem" Style (and the "margintop" would be lost).

Export Note: EPUBTools export also has one major disadvantage. All formatting within footnotes is lost.

(Toxaris was aware of this bug + it was fixed in v2.0 of EPUBTools... but progress on that release is currently stalled.)

DOCX:

<sup>1</sup> First Last, Book Title (2020), Publisher.

would turn into plain:

[1] First Last, Book Title (2020), Publisher.

(Losing the bold/italics.)

So if I have a document with actual DOCX footnotes in it (with heavy use of italics), I sadly have to fallback to a Calibre conversion.

Originally Posted by Hitch

There was, for some years, a deliberate incompatibility, due to a dispute between MSFT and Adobe. That's been resolved for...oh, 5-6 years now or a bit longer? Even their lowest-end PDF export works fine.

Yeah, PDF export was one of the largest advantages of LibreOffice for a long time.

Nowadays, newer versions of Word can do PDF export too. (Wasn't that added in Word 2013? It's definitely in 2016.)

Way back when, you had to mess with all these "PDF Printers" and other such nonsense (scam websites, scumbag conversion sites where you "send us your DOCX and we'll give you a PDF", etc.).

Such an enormous security risk + so many bugs in all those third party drivers... and Microsoft let that languish for decades.

Originally Posted by Hitch

Actually, if you have to deal with other people's cruft a lot, MS Word+Toxaris's ePUB Tools beats Calibre hands-down. It just does. I cannot tell you what a godsend those tools are, particularly for taking some Ad Hoc nightmare, tagging all the text formatting (local) like bold, italics, etc. and being able to, in one fell swoop, nuke all the other ad hoc formatting. It's ...fantastic.

Yep. It's my preferred way to convert DOCX->EPUB too.

EPUBTools

I love it because it strips everything down to barebones HTML (your basic <i>, <b>, <h1>, [...]), while still carrying over a clean slate for ebooks.

It also, optionally, lets you carry over your exact Styles:

• If your "Poetry" Style is in Word?
  
  • You'll get <p class="Poetry"> in your EPUB.
• "smallcaps" Style is used?
  
  • It'll appear as <span class="smallcaps">.
    
  • (Or it can auto-detect OpenType smallcaps, then convert that to a smallcaps class for you too!)

(Optional) You can even select which Styles you want to carry over in a dialog window.

Calibre

Follows the GIGO model. It will convert the document as is, but a lot of the garbage will come along too... All the hidden junk like:

• transparent background
• widows/orphans
• fractional + barely perceptible margin/font/font-size differences
• Colors (black text)
• [...]

AND, my biggest frustration, Calibre renames all unique combinations of Styles/formatting into "calibre123" class names.

- - -

Side Note: You can read all about the problem of hidden junk + "close-but-not-quite-the-same" classes in my posts:

• 2021: "Adding a limited Automate Feature To Sigil" (my Posts #92+)

The cleanup methods are pretty labor intensive + technical.

There will be tools in the near-future which will help this dirty-file cleanup though:

• 2021: "Possible To-Do List for Future Sigil Releases Post Sigil 1.8"

But Toxaris's EPUBTools, poof. All that hidden DOCX nonsense is gone at the push of a button!

Originally Posted by Hitch

Like I said--and I believe I've told the story here more than once--for probably a decade, I was a staunch anti-Word person.

I'm still pretty anti-Word.

LibreOffice lets you have actual multi-OS support.

Word on non-Windows platforms are second-class citizens.

• Word (Mac) ≠ Word (Windows)
  
  • No plugins.
    
  • (And key functionality like the "Select Similar Formatting" is missing too! [As of a few years ago. No idea if 365 added this.])
• Word (Online) ≠ Word (Windows)
• Word (Android/iOS) ≠ Word (Windows)
• Word (Linux)... there's no such thing.

And transferring between those, you'll have all sorts of fun.

LibreOffice is the same everywhere—Windows/Mac/Linux.

Note: For "Google Docs"-like functionality, there's Collabora Online.

For Android/iOS, there's Collabora Office.

Both of these are pretty much LibreOffice in the backend + a skin on top.

No more mangling up your documents between OSes!

Originally Posted by Hitch

(I have a horror story, truly, about a customer, Word, indices and foototes, and *&^%$#@* Google Docs.

[...]

He finally said "on an iPad" and when I pursued it further, turned out he was BY DEFAULT opening the goddamned files in GDocs and editing them, or even not, but just SAVING them and what happens? Yes, yes, yes, you guessed right--all the tagging, etc. totally disappeared. We redid that book 3x. What a nightmare.)

Google Drive Rant

Reminds me of my related story too.

I sent perfectly-Styled DOCX via Google Drive.

In my mind, I always just zoom my eyes to the upper-right corner, download the DOCX file directly.

Turns out, Google Drive, in their drive to "help"... see it's a DOCX file, then generate a fancy looking preview page... clicking anywhere in there converts+opens the file within Google Docs.

Author pops that open, does his fixes... I get it back... all my Styles, mangled. (Luckily, I don't rely heavily on Styles for that step, and only needed the textual changes, so I was able to somewhat recover.)

But yes... if you were relying on that more advanced Word innards, Google Docs open/save would mangle it + disappear it all into the ether.

(Even basic, gods damn Styles! Google Docs F's it all up!)

Note: And then you taught me the trick of being able to generate a URL directly to the Google Drive download. No more stupid Google Docs preview!

Online Grammarcheck Rant

Another serious problem online is these grammarchecker programs. (I shall not name the one I hate...)

IF you're in your Google Docs (or whatever browser-based app), you run your grammar plugin, then decide to make a correction, it will insert gobbledygook direct formatting.

Many people also copy/paste their entire document into these online checkers... then copy/paste back into their main document.

Disastrous consequences. (I was just reading a comment on Reddit a few weeks back where this guy was saying after doing that, Styles/classes around every word were introduced.)

Side Note: I'm no fan of those things either... and would never install them within the browser. They're some of the worst offenders at bloating memory usage + slowing down the entire browser dramatically.

Every year, DebugBear releases their browser extension analysis:

• 2021: "How do Chrome extensions impact browser performance?"
• "2020 Chrome Extension Performance Report"

Stuff like Evernote, coupon/shopping extensions, grammarcheckers... the worst.

[Turtle91]

Wow Hitch - I thought you were doing a great job channeling your inner Tex with the length of that post. But then he put a smack down with his reply!!

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Wow Hitch - I thought you were doing a great job channeling your inner Tex with the length of that post. But then he put a smack down with his reply!!

Tex always puts me to shame. It's not the length, it's the content. He has developed these Gigantor answers, full of info...I just yammer. I really am trying to pare down my posts....

H

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Wow Hitch - I thought you were doing a great job channeling your inner Tex with the length of that post. But then he put a smack down with his reply!!

It was only 1078 words!

(Hitch's previous was ~800. Very nice!)

Originally Posted by Hitch

Tex always puts me to shame. It's not the length, it's the content. He has developed these Gigantor answers, full of info...I just yammer. I really am trying to pare down my posts....

I love them just the way they are!