Span Span Span Sigil cleaning up indesign

[blackest]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

@blackest...I've tried both InDesign and Jutoh in the past but both have large learning curves. I eventually settled on Scrivener for both my writing environment and for its epub converter. Scrivener gives the cleanest conversion to epub that I've ever seen. Sure it has it's little quirks, but nothing like the problems and junk that is generated by InDesign for epub conversions. I now use the scriv doc to epub conversion as my start point for finishing off the epub in Sigil which is quite a quick workflow that works fairly well for me.

I gave Vellum a try out,
It has a limited number of styles for different things, It doesn't have a style for endnotes and doesn't attempt hard things like centring text on a page (not centering text on a line).

I found it managed to put images across pages unless you picked display on a separate page and the css for that was breakbefore and breakafter which meant in a double page view you got 1 image per 2 pages cutting out the css for break after made it more sane. No real editing ability in Vellum just paste in your bits and apply predefined styles.

So editing with Sigil is fairly straight forward, will have to see what scrivener can do.

[blackest]

Pages as a source.

No don't laugh it has got better, I was able to make a short fixed layout epub that looked good in adobe digital editions and ibooks. Text was written in lines i just created text boxes where i wanted text. If you style headings they will go in the toc although you might need to generate that in Sigil.

Playbooks mangled it but that may be due to my use of landscape pages.

Oh and the book validates

Readers might be a problem but it works

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by blackest

maybe it's easier to port a web page ... been a tiring week, things really haven't got any easier.

Have you ever looked at the amount of conditional coding seen in the source of many webpages in the hopes of making the page work with multiple browsers, screen resolutions, colour depth and ghod alone what other quirks? The other option is the old "This page best viewed with <programmer's current web browser of choice>" notice.

Been there, got the boilerplate to show for it.

[blackest]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Have you ever looked at the amount of conditional coding seen in the source of many webpages in the hopes of making the page work with multiple browsers, screen resolutions, colour depth and ghod alone what other quirks? The other option is the old "This page best viewed with <programmer's current web browser of choice>" notice.

Been there, got the boilerplate to show for it.

It's not near as bad as you think

And earlier I found this page.

https://ebooks.stackexchange.com/que...for-epub-books

Something I had never considered for epub is Brackets (brackets.io)

It is seriously good, unzip your epub and set the project folder to the base folder. Hit up an xhtml file and select live preview to see it displayed in chrome.

Click on a misbehaving element in chrome and see it highlighted in the editor.
It is not a replacement for Sigil by any means but boy can you make changes fast and see the results fast. One plugin I recommend installing for brackets is beautify. You can instantly see your code clearly and get to grips with it.

[JSWolf]

Why are you taking the ePub from InDesign and converting it to ePub with Calibre? You are best off cleaning up the code without converting. Converting is not a solution. Calibre is not going to handle a fixed layout ePub 3 well at all. Calibre does not convert to ePub 3.

[blackest]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why are you taking the ePub from InDesign and converting it to ePub with Calibre? You are best off cleaning up the code without converting. Converting is not a solution. Calibre is not going to handle a fixed layout ePub 3 well at all. Calibre does not convert to ePub 3.

I'm not the quote i found using calibre just pretty much showed how to use the regular expressions. Indesign spans, calibre spans , I don't like spans.

Sigil and spans that hasn't got much span in it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

finding lots of flawed epub generators, I think pages will take an indesign file now and not put spans around every word. It can't justify text but its better in some aspects. only thing that seems to handle pages fixed layout is ibooks so far playbooks which normally does a good job chokes on it even though everything validates!

[JSWolf]

You cannot convert a fixed layout ePub 3 with Calibre. It won't work.

[DiapDealer]

Did you miss the part where they said they weren't converting with calibre? It was the "I'm not" (converting with calibre) part.

[Hitch]

Originally Posted by blackest

I'm not the quote i found using calibre just pretty much showed how to use the regular expressions. Indesign spans, calibre spans , I don't like spans.

Sigil and spans that hasn't got much span in it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

finding lots of flawed epub generators, I think pages will take an indesign file now and not put spans around every word. It can't justify text but its better in some aspects. only thing that seems to handle pages fixed layout is ibooks so far playbooks which normally does a good job chokes on it even though everything validates!

I read the thread.

About 40% of our business is taking INDD files and making them into decent eBooks. And yes, Fixed-layout is part of that.

You can clean the spans, or not. While cleaning the code fulfils your inner geek, it doesn't really DO anything for the FXL ePUB. The ePUB doesn't work better, or not, based on those bloody spans. Yes, to those of us who stare at them, they're offensive, but...largely, they're also harmless. (n.b.: I have seen a situation in which when the offending spans were cleared out, the resulting FXL text wasn't as FXL as it ought to have been--the text would actually reflow, within the specific element, which was a bit of an eye-opener.)

I don't know of any magic app, that makes this process less painful. Our company's go-tos are Sigil and Epsilon; we use the latter for heavier-duty coding clips, but Sigil is near and dear to my own heart and that of several of our bookmakers.

I looked at Vellum, and yeah, if you're an author with no tech skills, it probably looks like the answer to a dream, albeit a limited one. Ditto all the others. I confess I've never heard of Brackets, but we're a PC- or Linux-using biz, not Mac users.

Sorry that I don't have a magic wand app, but...INDD is what it is. Once you make friends with it, the easier path IMHO is to edit the ninety-bajillion style overrides, in INDD, that you get from INDD users (esp. the inexperienced ones) and then the output is less horrible.

I do know some people who use INDD to make their eBooks, sans print books; I think they're insane, but people use what they're used to, don't they?

Offered solely FWIW.

Hitch

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by Hitch

Yes, to those of us who stare at them, they're offensive, but...largely, they're also harmless.

Early days, yet, in my investigations, but I think I've noticed a detrimental effect with Android reading apps with regard to the extraneous spans. I recently bought a commercial book that contained all the extra spans that displayed oddly on the Kindle Fire and Kindle for Android apps. In essence, the margin-top property of a specific paragraph class was being ignored (regardless of where in the "page" or file it occurred). I didn't notice the issue with the same book in Kindle for Windows or on a newer eink Kindle. Stripping the "naked" spans seemed to remedy the problem. The same effect was experienced with the commercial epub of the same title when viewed with the Android Kobo app, but I didn't experiment any further in that regard.

It's possible I've missed something obvious, but so far, I'm left with notion that "over spanning" just might create rendering problems on the Kindle For Android platform (and maybe Kobo).

I know for a fact that it affects Bookari's proprietary cloud sync feature. With all the spans in place, the best Bookari can do with regard to syncing reading progress (at least with epub3) is to open at the beginning of the most recent chapter. Without them, their cloud-sync performs rather admirably.

All "for what it's worth," natch.

[slowsmile]

duplicate

[DiapDealer]

Removing naked spans (or divs for that matter) is the primary reason I created the Tag Mechanic plugin.

[slowsmile]

@DiapDealer...Sorry for that mistake, I never intended tredding on anyone's toes, just wanted to help. And don't worry, I won't release the plugin.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

@DiapDealer...Sorry for that mistake, I never intended tredding on anyone's toes, just wanted to help. And don't worry, I won't release the plugin.

It's not like that. I'm not offended. I just wanted to save someone the trouble of reinventing the wheel.

Tag Mechanic does a lot of other things, as well. So if a single-purpose plugin such as yours scratches any user-itches, then don't NOT publish it just because it happens to duplicate functionality from another plugin.

[slowsmile]

@DiapDealer...Thanks and I go with what you say. I also have an aversion to reinventing the wheel. I have also used Tag Mechanic alot in the past, don't know why I forgot about that. Not to worry though, I felt a bit guilty when I finished that new plugin because it only took 3 lines of bs4 code in a loop to remove all spans. Your Tag Mechanic plugin is much better because it does a lot more besides so I reckon its more useful than my single purpose plugin.