Best way to do italic and bold

[BetterRed]

Toxaris' Epub-Tools is invaluable, although he wrote it to deal with the problems converting scanned books to EPUB, I find it very useful beyond that narrow scope.

It's Dialogue Checker is unique, its stored Search and Replace feature is invaluable, it has a Spell Checker with a presentation style similar to those found in programs such Notepad++, and the Sigil and Calibre ebook editors. Toxaris recently added a 'Mark' tool which is proving to be very useful to me.

Primarily for workflow reasons I don't use its EPUB creation function. I mainly use Calibre's DOCX->EPUB conversion feature via the command line, occasionally I use calibre's ebook-editor import DOCX.

BR

[rube]

oh, and of course, when I say I start with a .txt file it's because I've been given a word or open office file. I just select all and dump it on something like notepad to strip all the unwanted formatting and save it as a .txt. I get it off the word file very quickly and seeing as I'm only making very simple epubs none of the word formatting matters except for the parragraphs.

[odamizu]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

... There's no way for me to say this without sounding like I'm tooting my own horn, so I'll just say it: you should check out my TagMechanic plugin if you've got a lot of spans to be converted to other elements. It makes it pretty painless. It's especially handy if you've got nested spans where a simple search and replace might unwittingly break things.

I love this plugin! Thank you so much! So many hidden gems using Sigil that I am just now discovering (yes, I am slow )

I actually used to use <span class="italic"> for the occasional epub that I cobbled together by hand because up until now I was using Calibre, and Calibre would add a class to everything -- e.g., <em> becomes <em class="Calibre35"> -- and that drove me nuts. Calibre would respect <span class="italic">. But now that I'm using Sigil, I can start using <em> or <i> again! And Tag Mechanic makes it easy to fix all the epubs I created with Calibre. Yippeee!

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by sanjon

That Word add-in sound a bit like what I have tried to do in the past using RegEx and the like, but much more advanced

Definitely need to check that out, cheers! Does that handle things like italic and bold tags as well? But I guess you wouldn't have that in an OCR generated document anyway.

Of course it handles italic and bold. You would be surprised how often that can be an issue in OCR. I usually strip bold while exporting (yes, that is an option), since that is usually an OCR mistake. There is also an option to use either the <i> and <b> or the <em> and <strong> tag.

Originally Posted by rube

oh, and of course, when I say I start with a .txt file it's because I've been given a word or open office file. I just select all and dump it on something like notepad to strip all the unwanted formatting and save it as a .txt. I get it off the word file very quickly and seeing as I'm only making very simple epubs none of the word formatting matters except for the parragraphs.

That would also loose italic and I find that is often quite important in an book.

[rube]

Toxaris, yes it would. Luckily the only books I've worked on were so simple I think I've only needed one line of italic

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by odamizu

I love this plugin! Thank you so much! So many hidden gems using Sigil that I am just now discovering (yes, I am slow )

I actually used to use <span class="italic"> for the occasional epub that I cobbled together by hand because up until now I was using Calibre, and Calibre would add a class to everything -- e.g., <em> becomes <em class="Calibre35"> -- and that drove me nuts. Calibre would respect <span class="italic">. But now that I'm using Sigil, I can start using <em> or <i> again! And Tag Mechanic makes it easy to fix all the epubs I created with Calibre. Yippeee!

Glad you like it. I use it a lot, too. It's definitely something that grew out of my own need for such a tool.

Keep in mind that there's an equivalent plugin for calibre's editor (creatively titled "Diap's Editing Toolbag"), too. It combines what is now TagMechanic, a punctuation smartener and a CSS conversion tool.

[DiapDealer]

As interesting as this thread is to follow, I'm going to move it to the EPUB forum since it's not really anything Sigil specific (any more). The move may even bring more participants to the discussion. Please continue to discuss it there.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Glad you like it. I use it a lot, too. It's definitely something that grew out of my own need fir such a tool.

Aren't all the best tools created because of that reason?

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Aren't all the best tools created because of that reason?

Oh, undoubtedly.
I only meant to differentiate between this plugin, and several others I've created that I personally have no need to use.

[fbrzvnrnd]

I add my 2 cents to the thread. The semantic has another feature: if you give information to the computer of the /datas/ the ebook has got inside, you can query the /datas/ to create new sections of the book itself. For example: if you use <cite> instead <i>, you could create an interactive bibliography simply querying all the <cite> used inside the ebook.

I'm not sure that the epub:type semantic is so rich like Kevinh said. It seems to me the epub:type adds semantic of the structure of the book, not for the information the book is talking about; for example I don't know if I can use epub:type to say: "this is a name of a soldier who fight in a battle", "this is a history battle", "this is the year when this battle happened". I think microdata could be a more useful semantic tool for EPUB3.

[JSWolf]

The best way to do italic and bold are <i>some italic text</i> and <b>some bold text</b>.

[fbrzvnrnd]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The best way to do italic and bold are <i>some italic text</i> and <b>some bold text</b>.

I build a lot of ebooks, I think I *never* used <i> or <b>

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by fbrzvnrnd

for example I don't know if I can use epub:type to say: "this is a name of a soldier who fight in a battle", "this is a history battle", "this is the year when this battle happened". I think microdata could be a more useful semantic tool for EPUB3.

Surely microdata of this granularity is best handled by just reading the book rather than querying it.

[fbrzvnrnd]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Surely microdata of this granularity is best handled by just reading the book rather than querying it.

If you are building a history ebook you can query datas for chronicles, or Index Name, for example.

[bookman156]

The more particular tagging becomes the more one has to assume that the one doing the tagging has been both consistent and meticulous, else any data gathering based on it will have holes where the creator was looking out of the window instead of paying attention.

It may be useful to build a bibliography from <cite> tags but if a few books have been given <i> tags then they will not appear. Better to build a bibliography by writing down the books and articles you refer to in your bibliography file as you refer to them. Typically academic articles referred to wouldn't be in italic anyway, rather in quote marks, depending on the style used.

I remember spending two months making an index to a complex book. I had to start over several times when I realised by page 50 or 100 that I should have been indexing something that I had ignored. While a human-built index will always be better than a machine-built one or a simple search, it will inevitably be idiosyncratic as the art of indexing is to make decisions on what to include on the basis of whether someone would ever want to look that up and how they would approach looking it up. But I can understand why so many books don't have a good index or none at all. It's hard work providing humanistic inroads into a book.