Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Q&A

I got an email yesterday which will perhaps interest others:
I read your book Notjohn's Guide to .. 2016. Which is very good but I could not find an answer to my basic question. I'm finishing my hopefully sixth and final edit of my non-fiction book which is typed on a current version of Word.

Q: I've typed my book in word in the style in which I would expect to see the final book, namely indented paragraphs at 0.3, justified margins, bold chapter numbers and titles, oversized headings of H1, H2 , etc. If the html style tags ultimately give these same commands to the epub, should I have typed the manuscript with no indentation, no bold or oversized chapter headings, etc? Will html result in excessive paragraph indentation, oversized headings, etc? 
A good question, to which I replied:
Are you going to use Word2CleanHtml.com and Sigil with the style sheet from my blog? If so, it doesn't really matter. Word2Clean will probably show all paragraphs as [p] but if it gets fancy with sometime like [p class="normal"] you can just do a search and replace in Sigil to change them instantly. (I'm using square brackets because Gmail software doesn't permit angled brackets. Of course you would substitute < for [ and so on.)
I use Word to build the basic book, especially if there's going to be a print edition. So all my paragraphs are indented except for the first para in a chapter or major section. Word2Clean doesn't seem to care -- they all come back as plan [p] tags, so all I have to do is go find the ones I don't wanted indented and change that to [p class="first"].
Good luck! -- NJ