Span Span Span Sigil cleaning up indesign

[blackest]

Originally Posted by Hitch

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

Brackets is a text editor aimed at web design and is fully cross platform and free.

https://github.com/adobe/brackets/releases

epub3 format isn't quite the same as html5 largely down to the pages.

You will not see where a page is going to split but it can do some really nice things. It loads the xhtml file into chrome along with the related css. naturally the browser window will tend to be too wide but you can resize it, to suit.
one thing you can do is click on an element in the browser and it will be highlighted in the brackets editor and if you click on the class being used it opens the css for the class and you can edit that.
but there is more you can inspect the xhtml page in chrome same as any other web page you can also try editing the css in the browser to see the effect or add additional css rules to an element. For an existing css file you can see which line the rule is on and open the css file in brackets and change the css file. You can also save the page complete in the browser.

javascript:document.body.contentEditable = 'true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

the lines of javascript above highlight them in your browser and drag to your bookmarks folder and edit the book mark to give it a title now when you press that book mark on any webpage it is totally editable.

another useful line is

document.body.style.overflow = 'auto'

in the developer console it re enables page scrolling, the two are useful in general if you get an anti adblock popup you can make the page editable and delete the popup not related to epubs but very handy

Anyway give brackets a go, it will not replace sigil but it is a great way to edit you could even write a book mostly in your browser. That might be too extreme. It very much is a useful tool and we need useful tools

[KevinH]

Almost all of this can be done in Sigil. It has a Preview window to show the current html document, it has an Inspector widget to inspect any element (same as Chrome), BookView is simply an html document with contentEditable set to true, and placing your cursor in BookView and then switching to CodeView will take you to that place. You can also use the epubcheck plugin to verify your epub and take you right to the errors found in Codeview by clickingng on the output.

Furthermore you can use Open With in Sigil to use any external editor for your html file, image file, etc.