No indents and white spaces between paragraphs

[Notjohn]

Originally Posted by Hitch

@Notjohn, you are ALWAYS recommending this site to newbies. Did you know that it did THIS??? That is total SHITE.

Hitch

Well, shite in = shite out. I've never seen anything but absolutely clean html. (And I make no effort to use styles in Word.) Indeed, I opened that sample chapter, linked the style sheet, Prettyfied it, and it was a hound's tooth. No space tags whatever. There were three errors from Flight Crew, but those came from the shite in.

If you managed to reproduce them, I can't imagine how you did it. I would post the result here, but I rebooted my computer yesterday and it's gone.

[Doitsu]

Originally Posted by awcross

My process for formatting in Sigil is this:

[...]
2. paste into word2cleanhtml. Copy.

You don't have to use an external website. In addition to Toxaris's e-PUB Tools Word add-in, you could also use DiapDealer's DOCXImport Sigil plugin, which generates pretty clean HTML files.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Well, shite in = shite out. I've never seen anything but absolutely clean html. (And I make no effort to use styles in Word.) Indeed, I opened that sample chapter, linked the style sheet, Prettyfied it, and it was a hound's tooth. No space tags whatever. There were three errors from Flight Crew, but those came from the shite in.

If you managed to reproduce them, I can't imagine how you did it. I would post the result here, but I rebooted my computer yesterday and it's gone.

Reproduce them? No, I just opened this guy's file. No idea what that cruft is, but I'm pretty surprised to see it there.

Originally Posted by Doitsu

You don't have to use an external website. In addition to Toxaris's e-PUB Tools Word add-in, you could also use DiapDealer's DOCXImport Sigil plugin, which generates pretty clean HTML files.

Yup, both are excellent.

Hitch

[GrannyGrump]

NJ, yes Sigil's Prettify fixes the superfluous spacing and line feeds, but what a shame that it should be necessary to do that. Someone who is doing their editing in a text editor *rather than Sigil* is going to have a rough road with Search and Replace if line feed and/or spaces fall in the middle of the phrase they are searching for.

[JSWolf]

Depending on the formatting of the eBook, it might be easier to save as text from Word and apply the styles manually in the ePub.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

Well, shite in = shite out. I've never seen anything but absolutely clean html. (And I make no effort to use styles in Word.) Indeed, I opened that sample chapter, linked the style sheet, Prettyfied it, and it was a hound's tooth. No space tags whatever. There were three errors from Flight Crew, but those came from the shite in.

If you managed to reproduce them, I can't imagine how you did it. I would post the result here, but I rebooted my computer yesterday and it's gone.

If I may, perhaps that's because you're NOT a commercial formatter? You're only formatting your OWN STUFF, which is fairly clean to begin with. So, of course, some idiot website "cleans" your HTML--because there's very little to clean. I'll bet, having seen that cruft, that it couldn't come close to cleaning the shite we see here at my shop--and that would mean, the same for all those poor souls you've sent there.

I mean, think about it. Otherwise, you're saying that your source files are all garbage? I suspect not. I mean, I am gobsmacked that those lf codes came through, on an allegedly "cleaned" file.

My entire point, NJ, is that you might want to run some tests, with files OTHER than your own, to see if that site actually does ANYTHING. Given that you recommend it far and wide????? I'm not criticizing you; I'm saying, this is an opportunity for you to revisit your recommendation.

Hitch

[Notjohn]

I am gobsmacked that those lf codes came through, on an allegedly "cleaned" file.

But Hitch, I opened that selfsame file in Sigil, linked it to the style sheet, Prettified it, and I didn't see any of the flaws you describe. No space tags. Flight Crew did show three errors, but two of them were easily fixed by using the TOC and Metadata tools. (I forget what the third error was.)

And to recapitulate: I write in WordStar, open in Word for tweaking, and save to *.docx. I don't use Styles at all. For me, Word is just a virtual typewriter whose only virtue is that it can do curly quotes and em dashes, and is accepted by other softwares and by my editor.

The closest thing to a problem I've ever had with Word2Clean was when I fed it an OpenOffice Writer doc and instead of <p> tags it gave me <p class="normal"> which was readily fixed by doing a search and replace.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Notjohn

But Hitch, I opened that selfsame file in Sigil, linked it to the style sheet, Prettified it, and I didn't see any of the flaws you describe.

I'm not sure why you're having such a hard time understanding everyone's point, so I'll try to make it plain: if the word2clean site creates such clean html, why on earth does it need to be mended and prettified with Sigil? The point is that the html produced by word2clean - BEFORE YOU PRETTIFIED IT WITH SIGIL - was quite ugly.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

I'm not sure why you're having such a hard time understanding everyone's point, so I'll try to make it plain: if the word2clean site creates such clean html, why on earth does it need to be mended and prettified with Sigil? The point is that the html produced by word2clean - BEFORE YOU PRETTIFIED IT WITH SIGIL - was quite ugly.

Thanks, D. That was, indeed, my precise point. If the whole point of "Word2Clean" is to CLEAN the HTML...shouldn't it, in fact, be clean???

Hitch

[DiapDealer]

Never mind the empty elements--both block and inline.

What exactly is:

<p>
    <em> </em>
</p>

supposed to accomplish any way?

[JSWolf]

Personally, I've cleaned some Word crud manually and the thing is, I know what the changes are vs some website that does it and I have no idea what's been changed.

[Maui]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Never mind the empty elements--both block and inline.

What exactly is:

<p>
    <em> </em>
</p>

supposed to accomplish any way?

Assuming there are margins in the browsers/readers stylesheet for <p> or in the user stylesheet, this will result in an emphasized space between two other elements

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Maui

Assuming there are margins in the browsers/readers stylesheet for <p> or in the user stylesheet, this will result in an emphasized space between two other elements

Not with many renderers it won't. If you're not going to use css for vertical space between elements (and you should), then you need to have some sort of content for that vertical spacing to properly render across the widest range of rendering engines.

Typically something like:

<p>&nbsp;</p>

or

<p><br/></p>

is often utilized.

The empty tags pointed out above will often result in no vertical spacing whatsoever on many reading devices/apps.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by Maui

Assuming there are margins in the browsers/readers stylesheet for <p> or in the user stylesheet, this will result in an emphasized space between two other elements

Please see what Diap said. That's really not right.

Hitch

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by Maui

Assuming there are margins in the browsers/readers stylesheet for <p> or in the user stylesheet, this will result in an emphasized space between two other elements

See above comments...but I got quite the chuckle out of it!!