Best way to do italic and bold

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

In that case the title is part of the citation/reference. It is not the title of the book/document itself.

To me it seems they are trying to make HTML more semantic, but they do it only partially and not consistent. Anyway, I don't want to be depending on a renderer to decide who things must look as this is not defined in the standard. If they would specify the standard rendering of a semantic tag, it could be easily used and overruled. It is almost impossible to prevent every possible layout that a renderer could apply to a tag as their standard.

Just a title on its own they regard as something for <cite>. See their Doctor Who example. But I tend to agree it is a bit flaky, since they regard an author name as something to use <cite> on too, whereas in actual practice you wouldn't usually want to differentiate such text. They have the strange example of Charles Bukowski. As far as I'm concerned, that's just a name. But Love is a dog from hell is a book title and should be italicised.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by st_albert

Seems no one has answered this question, at least directly, so I'll give you my reasons.

In some cases, I create epubs via export from InDesign CS4, which implements character styles with spans. It loves spans so much it even wraps all paragraphs in a "generic span" that has a null definition in the stylesheet, just in case you want to define them later (I suppose). IIRC, later versions of ID will let the user define the HTML used to implement a given style.

Thanks. I had a suspicion it might be as a result of InDesign export. Fair enough.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by st_albert

In either case, the epubs so obtained require considerable tweaking in Sigil, and I like my saved clips and S/R's to be applicable to epubs from either source, to the extent possible.

Out of interest, do you leave the span class italics you get from InDesign export or do you replace them when tweaking in Sigil?

[rube]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Be interesting to hear how people generally approach making an EPUB from scratch.

I don't do a lot of epubs so my experience level is lower than most here, but I've been trying to work out the simplest quickest way of doing every simple epubs (reflowable, no links or fancy formatting etc). I used to mark up with a html editor first but I've found starting from a .txt is pretty nice with Sigil because all the paragraphs are already marked in. Sigil puts in <p>s for what it sees as blank lines but I can remove them all in one go with a find and replace and that only leaves me changing heading and putting in microscopic css in the header. Of course this wouldn't work for anything more complicated but starting from scratch in Sigil works for very basic epubs.

[sanjon]

Originally Posted by bookman156

Be interesting to hear how people generally approach making an EPUB from scratch. I suppose if you have an InDesign file already you'd make one from that, but if I wanted to kinda write the book itself from scratch into an EPUB? Maybe it would seem natural to write it as webpages in Dreamweaver, as I'm quite used to that and it uses the tags I prefer. Or perhaps it would be better to design it in InDesign. Do people create EPUBs from scratch in Sigil?

I think I would start from a Word file because you can visualize the book as you write it. Then save the document as Web Page, Filtered to get the HTML file. Of course Word introduces a lot of garbage and inline styles but I have a script that cleans all of that out and adds some custom styles.

Otherwise I would just use something like Notepad++ (or in your case Dreamweaver) to write the book in HTML and just view it in the browser every once in a while. Although I feel like the writing experience wouldn't be the same.

Calibre is quite good at making the actual EPUB if you supply it with a single HTML file and will break it up into separate files. So there is no need to start with an EPUB.

I must say though that I don't have much experience with writing, this is just what I do for conversions. And I don't even know if those are best practices

[bookman156]

It generally makes sense to write a book in a word processor, Word or the LibreOffice one. Although I also write on a manual typewriter and scan it in later. But if I want a web page from a Word document I wouldn't export as HTML I would copy and paste it into Notepad to strip it of crap and from there into a blank XHTML file that I'd already styled with CSS, usually because it is another page of an already existing website. (I guess you could also just save the Word doc as .txt but I prefer copy and paste.) You wouldn't have to worry about bad Word formatting and could tag from scratch in XHTML. You'd only have to refer to the original document to see if anything was italic.

Alternatively, you'd place the Word document in InDesign and style it there, particularly if a print book is your first concern rather than an ebook. I do write directly into Dreamweaver if I'm writing for the web as I can see what it will look like as I'm writing without having to view it in a browser. But I don't think I would want to write a whole book in Dreamweaver, notwithstanding that you can end up with a million word website solely created that way. (Although I suppose most websites these days use a CMS and don't 'hand-roll' any more.)

I don't think I would want to produce solely an ebook without a print book, but if I did I think Word > Text > Dreamweaver XHTML > Sigil would be the way I would do it. But as I would want a print book first and foremost (and may never actually do an ebook) it would be Word > InDesign. So any EPUB would inevitably be made from the InDesign file.

[sanjon]

Originally Posted by bookman156

I don't think I would want to produce solely an ebook without a print book, but if I did I think Word > Text > Dreamweaver XHTML > Sigil would be the way I would do it. But as I would want a print book first and foremost (and may never actually do an ebook) it would be Word > InDesign. So any EPUB would inevitably be made from the InDesign file.

I don't have much experience with print books, but going through a .txt file (as you and rube both say) after having the book in Word sounds like a good idea when focusing on ebooks.

When you go from Word > InDesign > EPUB, does InDesign get rid of all of the garbage that Word generates? Or is the resulting EPUB still filled with tons of inline styles? Because that's one thing I try hard to avoid.

[Toxaris]

I usually work from a Word file, often result of an OCR scan process. Then I clean the whole document up and fix the OCR errors with my add-in. Then I directly export from Word to an ePUB. Often I use a standard stylesheet which is automatically inserted into the ePUB (and linked of course) when I export it as an ePUB from Word. As a final touch I load the ePUB into Sigil for some work if needed.

Needless to say is that the XHTML in the ePUB created in this way does NOT contain any of the Word HTML garbage and that it can handle things like tables, foot- and endnotes, images, equations and so on. If you want, you can even generate a stylesheet based on the styles used in the Word document.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by sanjon

When you go from Word > InDesign > EPUB, does InDesign get rid of all of the garbage that Word generates? Or is the resulting EPUB still filled with tons of inline styles? Because that's one thing I try hard to avoid.

You can have a 'Clean imported text' workflow in InDesign to scrub up Word files, and then you style it, so no, you won't have any Word rubbish if you clean it up right.

But InDesign > EPUB may introduce its own stuff.

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I usually work from a Word file, often result of an OCR scan process. Then I clean the whole document up and fix the OCR errors with my add-in.

That looks pretty handy, particularly its ability to check that an opening quote is definitely followed by a closing quote, that's often a very annoying OCR error. Do you know if there is any way to check that in Sigil in an EPUB itself?

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by bookman156

That looks pretty handy, particularly its ability to check that an opening quote is definitely followed by a closing quote, that's often a very annoying OCR error. Do you know if there is any way to check that in Sigil in an EPUB itself?

As far as I know, there is no plugin that does the same or similar thing. It is quite a unique (and handy if I say so myself) feature.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by bookman156

That looks pretty handy, particularly its ability to check that an opening quote is definitely followed by a closing quote, that's often a very annoying OCR error. Do you know if there is any way to check that in Sigil in an EPUB itself?

But an opening quote isn't always followed by a close quote. When you have multi-paragraph quotes, for example, it's conventional to only have a close quote on the final paragraph. Ie:

"The first paragraph of my speech.
"And I carry on talking here.
"And go on here.
"And finally finish."

[bookman156]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But an opening quote isn't always followed by a close quote. When you have multi-paragraph quotes, for example, it's conventional to only have a close quote on the final paragraph. Ie:

That's a very good point, although thankfully it wouldn't occur too often.

[Toxaris]

Originally Posted by bookman156

That's a very good point, although thankfully it wouldn't occur too often.

It depends on the language. In some languages it is even different. In those languages the next paragraph in the same dialogue would start with a closing quote.
I have taken that into account.

[sanjon]

Originally Posted by Toxaris

I clean the whole document up and fix the OCR errors with my add-in. Then I directly export from Word to an ePUB. Often I use a standard stylesheet which is automatically inserted into the ePUB (and linked of course) when I export it as an ePUB from Word. As a final touch I load the ePUB into Sigil for some work if needed.

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.