Nickel won't display secondary font in body text

[foosion]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Probably. For this ebook, my first thought was that someone thought Vellum didn't create complex enough CSS. Oddly, the formatting wasn't that bad, just that the CSS was ridiculously overcomplex.

The one book I've edited with a Vellum CSS was the most ridiculously complex CSS I've ever seen. How anyone thought that was a sensible way to proceed is beyond me. They could have gotten the same appearance with a much simpler CSS.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by foosion

The one book I've edited with a Vellum CSS was the most ridiculously complex CSS I've ever seen. How anyone thought that was a sensible way to proceed is beyond me. They could have gotten the same appearance with a much simpler CSS.

For the most part, Vellum is not aimed at those of us who would dig into the internals of the ePub.

Vellum's market is mostly indie authors who write their document in Word or other program generating .docx output and then feed the .docx file into Vellum to generate various flavours of ePub output (ePub2/ePub3, Apple, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Google, generic) with an option for mobi for local testing on Kindle ereaders/apps. For non-ebook uses, you can generate an print ready output file.

As a group, the authors that I have dealt with are more concerned with generating output that will work without requiring them to know about stylesheets, ebook structure, etc. They do care about not generating masses of complaints.

[foosion]

Originally Posted by DNSB

For the most part, Vellum is not aimed at those of us who would dig into the internals of the ePub.

Vellum's market is mostly indie authors who write their document in Word or other program generating .docx output and then feed the .docx file into Vellum to generate various flavours of ePub output (ePub2/ePub3, Apple, Kindle, Kobo, Nook, Google, generic) with an option for mobi for local testing on Kindle ereaders/apps. For non-ebook uses, you can generate an print ready output file.

As a group, the authors that I have dealt with are more concerned with generating output that will work without requiring them to know about stylesheets, ebook structure, etc. They do care about not generating masses of complaints.

What's a good strategy for dealing with cascading divs, each containing multiple classes, and other such complexity?

[DNSB]

For me, I have a collection of saved searches in Sigil that clean up most of the cascaded divs. They also remove almost all of the media queries from the media stylesheet since they are not needed for most ePub ebooks and clean up a good chunk of the unneeded bits in the styles stylesheet. I also dump dropcaps in this process and convert the ornamental breaks to a single <p>

The workflow is:

1. Open the Vellum generated ePub in Sigil.
2. Run the HTML saved search group to clean up the text files
3. Run the Automate List 1 (runs a collection of Sigil tools and plugins)
4. Run the CSS saved search group to clean up unneeded bits from the stylesheets
5. Reformat the CSS stylesheets to multiple line (builtin Sigil tool)
6. Run the Afters saved search group. Cleans up some bits and bobs left by the other tools
7. Replace the code used to display the cover image and add my bits to the stylesheet.
8. Use TagMechanic to remove blank divs, spans and possibly others.
9. Run Automate List 2 and if no errors, it's done.

It takes longer to type that out than to actually do it. I played with using Editor Chains to do much the same in calibre's ebook editor but was just easier to use Sigil.

Looking at my saved search names, call me boring.

[foosion]

Not a trivial number of changes. If I run into another Vellum monstrosity I may bother you for a copy of your saved searches and automations, if that's not a problem.

Dropcaps should be dropped. I don't mind "* * *" breaks or something equally inoffensive.

[ZodWallop]

For my own adjustment, I have taken some PDFs from Open Library and have converted them to ePubs. Having done this, I've generated my own stylesheet. Considering I'm self taught, I think I've done pretty well.

[Aleron Ives]

Maybe we need a "share your e-book cleanup scripts" thread of some kind.