Sick of returning to vomit


I’m coming down with a cold, which is a ridiculous thing to happen in a tropical country. I have muscular pains in my legs, my head aches and my voice is deterioating into a whisper. I’ve taken vitamin C, paracetamol and chocolate and still I feel quite, quite grotty.

I’ve been working on getting a ebook into readable condition, and this is a laborious process; I’m quite certain there’s a more efficient way than how I’m going about it, but this is what I have for now:

The manuscript starts life as a Microsoft Word document. I save it as a plain text file, and then open that in Sigil, an ePub editor. That means you lose

Italics
Bold fonts
Styles in general
Line breaks
Page breaks
Headings
Links to footnotes

and when you’re in Sigil, it turns out you lose smart quotation marks too. I assume that’s because they don’t conform to the HTML standard for the files that Sigil wants to consume.

If you don’t export as plain text, but try to get Word to dump out an HTML document, thus preserving all the styles, breaks, links and other goodness, the file you get is riddled with extraneous HTML tags which don’t show up in Sigil but make your final book look horrendous in a reader like a Kindle.

This is a shame, because the book I’m preparing has lots of footnotes and other internal links, and quite a lot of stylistic flourishes that I’d like to preserve. Sadly, I’ve not found a way to cleanly and reliably preserve them, so once I’ve got the file into Sigil, I have to add styles and structure back by hand.

It also becomes clear that little things like smart quotation marks don’t get transferred in this process, which will mean more grunt work to set those up (probably entailing slightly arcane HTML codes to get them to show up right). Fortunately I’m dealing with less than 40,000 word, but it’s significantly harder than I hoped and expected it to be. This is despite doing the same thing a couple of years ago to publish Diet Croydon through the Kindle store. Creating ebooks, like a dog returning to its vomit, is a triumph of hope over experience.

I’m roughly a third of the way through now, but this is without doing any proper editting: getting the words in the right place on the page isn’t the same as assessing whether the whole thing flows, whether the internal structure and the leitmotifs are properly constructed, whether you’re making something people should read, as well as something people can read. Sigil is not very nice as a document editor, but once you start missing the ability to track changes, you’re in danger of ending up back with Microsoft Word and reiterating the whole process.

This first stage, then, should be perfect for when you’re feeling a bit poorly, like me right now. Not so sick you’re incapable, but with just enough of your brain shaved off so that you’re not provoked to rage by the unnecessary complexity of what you’re doing. Sadly you can still be fatigued by it, which is why after a few chapters I knocked it on the head to go home and eat soup while reading a chef’s memoir. I hope to have conquered this book by the end of the weekend, along with a first draft of my video about Singapore. Or a first draft of a script. Or something.

,

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.