EPUB BOOK Creator - From Scratch ???

[mrmikel]

It isn't Gates haters per se.

Word has never worked the way I want to work. I like Wordperfect, but the html it puts out is terrible.

I know enough html and css to be dangerous and Sigil would be a fine program for me to produce epubs from scratch. But that is me.

Word is just too powerful for probably 75% that use it, given what they want to do. And they don't want to be bothered to try to figure it out. Given how I feel about Word, I can sympathize. But only to a point.

[JSWolf]

What I see is a lot of people not knowing how to use Word to be able to output clean HTML. They don't know how and they don't know where to go to look. The problem with Word is that there is no manual included with it. All you get is online help. It's also not easy to find a good book on Word. And when you do find a book on Word you can use, it won't be telling you how to do things to setup Word so you can output clean HTML good enough as the source for eBook creation.

[st_albert]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

So would the best way to start in Word be to create a default document that has just the styles that might be used?

Yeah, that's basically what I do when formatting an author's .docx or .rtf into an epub (say, for an ARC). My experience has been that authors (and editors) don't concern themselves with what I'd term typographical or semantic markup in their Word docs. For example, if by default a paragraph does not indent the first line, they will not change the style. They will add a tab, sometimes, or a space or two and then a tab, and so on. They are depending on the concept of WYSIWYG, literally, and they do what they think they need to do to hammer the styling into shape.

My job is to turn WYSIWYG into "What You See is What You MEANT," in some consistent way. That means imposing, at my discression, pre-defined "house" styles and absolutely NO "direct formatting" as Libre Office calls it, or "overrides" as ID calls it. Upon export to epub, this results in very clean xhtml, which can be easily tweaked with Sigil.

No freakin' worries, once the source is cleaned up as above.

This also applies when importing said .doc into InDesign, which is further tweaked by me and my boss, who is the final say as to print book interior design. That final ID file (after edits, proofreeding, and further edits, etc.) is exported as the basis for the print book, and the final epub, which is used for the basis for the final Kindle, and so on.

My point being, the average highly creative and talented author is not likely to concern her/himself with details of semantic document design. Nor, I dare say, should they be. That is for us drones to provide. Usuallly, for a fee (that someone, somewhere has to pay).

Just my two cents...

Albert

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

It isn't Gates haters per se.

Word has never worked the way I want to work. I like Wordperfect, but the html it puts out is terrible.

I know enough html and css to be dangerous and Sigil would be a fine program for me to produce epubs from scratch. But that is me.

Word is just too powerful for probably 75% that use it, given what they want to do. And they don't want to be bothered to try to figure it out. Given how I feel about Word, I can sympathize. But only to a point.

I was a Word-hater, some years back. I stuck with Wordperfect, determined to ride out the "scorched earth" thing, under the (mistaken) assumption that other people were like me, preferred being able to see the tags, etc. Well, we all know that wasn't the way it went.

I started using Word because my clients increasingly had it (this is when I was building hotels, not making books, so mid-late 90's, I'd guess). I constantly got angry over how "Word doesn't do what I want it to." Then I needed to do something--I forget what the hell it was--a big, long, tedious document of hundreds of pages, IIRC--in legal outline form, and I bit the bullet and took about 2 total hours of online tutorials at Microsoft. Inside of 10 minutes, I had my first "lightbulb" moment; inside of 30 minutes, you couldn't have torn me away from the tutorials; and inside of 2 hours, I had Word down pretty pat.

Once I understood several things, it was simplicity itself, and now I can make Word act exactly as I like it. The basic concepts are simple: Word's built in styles are simply CSS. That's it. The Styles you see in the Styles panel output directly as CSS. And just like CSS, changing or editing or modifying a Style changes all the elements to which that style is applied. That's one concept.

The second is, Word has a simple hierarchy, just like HTML (which is what it is, actually); a letter inside a word, inside a sentence, inside a paragraph, inside a section, inside a document. That's it. If you use header styles, you can create incredibly useful outlines that a) create Document Maps, b) are hierarchical, just like the h1-h6 headers in an ePUB/Sigil, c) can be used in Outline View, so you can see your entire document at once, or nearly at once, depending on length, d) allows you to drag-and-drop entire sections in your book/document; e) re-arrange major sections, create sub-sections, and the like. Oh, and automatically create TOC's, both with/without numbers. With the click of a button.

Want a simple bit of knowledge? The closing paragraph tag carries all the formatting for the paragraph it closes. You don't see opening tags. If you delete the lagging pilcrow (closing para tag), you delete that paragraph's formatting. That's why using the backspace key rampantly can produce such unexpected results.

There mayn't be any printed manuals for Word, but there are scads of excellent how-tos and toots all over the Web. In my opinion, this guy has some of the best: http://www.addbalance.com/usersguide/styles.htm . However, he expects you to actually read it. (That wasn't sarcasm; my experience with my clients is, ironically, that reading any "tecchie" instructions is not their bag. I expect that this is not true of most MR'ers.)

So would the best way to start in Word be to create a default document that has just the styles that might be used?

Absolutely. And name your styles to match your CSS. That's where it starts to get uber-simple.

There aren't any "instructions" on how to output "clean" HTML. The trick is, don't cruft it up in the first place. Use only very limited inline styles (italic, bold, underscore). Use named styles for all paragraph types, and all header types. Don't use "ad hoc" styles--in other words, don't type a paragraph, then decide to create a blockquote, and use the tab key to do it. Create a blockquote or indented-para style, and apply it to the paragraph in question. Honestly, once you see it, you'll see it. It makes life dramatically easier, in so many ways it's hard to describe them all.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

I can see the problem though. What you are describing, Hitch, is much how you would create a document in Sigil. If you can do Sigil, if you want, you can do Word.

But if you have trouble with one you are going to have trouble with the other.

It may be a bit unfair, but I detect among some authors an attitude along the lines of "I am the great artiste, the next Shakespeare, I need not trouble myself with details, my words are golden and must be laid out on the page thus, as I also am the next Leonardo Da Vinci."

Such a person is not going to condescend to learn his/her tools.

If you are Winston Churchill you can truly say, "I am a great man." Most of these people are only illustrative of Ted Sturgeon's law: "85% of everything is crap."

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by mrmikel

I can see the problem though. What you are describing, Hitch, is much how you would create a document in Sigil. If you can do Sigil, if you want, you can do Word.

Sort of. It's really not quite the same. Everyone here knows I love Sigil, but there are, quite simply, things that can be easily done in Word that would not-so-easily be done in Sigil--and some things that can't be replicated, not unless done manually. It's not just headers and plain paragraphs; and there are many functions in Word that would be enormously helpful to any writer--fiction, non-fiction, etc. that are sadly overlooked, and replaced with all sorts of make-do scenarios, rather than using the easiest available. Just because they don't want to research it, or suffer through a few minutes of a Toot. Seems silly to me.

But if you have trouble with one you are going to have trouble with the other.

That's possibly quite likely true.

It may be a bit unfair, but I detect among some authors an attitude along the lines of "I am the great artiste, the next Shakespeare, I need not trouble myself with details, my words are golden and must be laid out on the page thus, as I also am the next Leonardo Da Vinci."

Such a person is not going to condescend to learn his/her tools.

I think I'll pass on commenting on that. I don't see how I possibly could and still manage to stay out of trouble. Suffice it to say, given what my business does, I do tend to run into a lot of authors (by sheer definition) that have not/do not/don't want to learn how to use Word. Or any other writing/drafting tool. And some of you have heard me get uber-cranky about poets in particular, and page layout.

If you are Winston Churchill you can truly say, "I am a great man." Most of these people are only illustrative of Ted Sturgeon's law: "85% of everything is crap."

Well, crap writing or not doesn't mean that someone can't spend an hour or two and learn how to use their tools. Presumably, somehow, they learned how to key on a keyboard (mostly). Presumably, they've learned how to send/receive email, attach files, use Track Changes...it's not a giant leap for Mankind to learn how to use the basics of a word-processing program.

However, I'm at the "I give up" stage about this; I don't expect to see that any time soon. BUT, that being said, here on MR, I do expect to see that at least some of you come to realize that it's not Word that generates the "cruft" inasmuch as the users. AWP may well make the output less "cruft-ful," and if so, good for it, but as we tend to be creatures of logic here, let's try to do adequate analysis of the real "HTML output" issues with Word (or OO, LO, AWP, Jutoh, etc.) when we discuss what outputs good/bad source code. That's all I'm sayin'.

Hitch

[mrmikel]

"And some of you have heard me get uber-cranky about poets in particular, and page layout."

Ever since Shelley spouted this nonsense, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." they have been insufferable.

I suspect Word or any other word processor is much more useful with completely raw material than with the OCR'd junk most of us hobbyists fiddle with.