On Tue, Dec 13, 2011 at 8:44 AM, Jim Adcock
<jimad@msn.com> wrote:
In a desire to inflict injury upon myself, I downloaded this thing and tried
it. What I tested, and what I found is:
I started by downloading a recent HTML from PG "at random" directly into MS
Word using the url as the "file name" in Word so that Word would know where
to load the images from -- this happened to be the latest "Princess from
Mars" with images.
To my somewhat surprise Word was happy to accept a url and loaded the entire
html document including images.
I then saved this in docx format.
Using the Aspose addin (30 day free trial) I then converted this docx into
an epub.
To my great surprise it [somewhat] "worked." The only apparent rendering
problem I see is that the "Princess from Mars" float-right page numbers end
up being somewhat super-imposed on top of the text that one is suppose to be
reading (but please read my previous comments about just how much I think
page numbers are a "good idea" in the first place ;-)
Renaming this epub to princess.zip and unpacking it what I see is:
The addin violates typical sane-assumptions about epub by packing "all" the
html into one 630 kB file, where for best compatibility they should be
following epub recommendations to limit individual file sizes to, what is
it? 300 kB?
The generated html is about the same quality of crappiness as Word generated
HTML "filtered" -- probably a bit worse than this actually -- with <span>
instructions at random every sentence and a half or so, I don't understand
why they are doing this, which keep trying to reset the font to the
identical color and size.
I have no idea what this thing costs after the 30 day trial runs out.
In summary, it might be useful for people who want a quick and dirty way to
SR their HTML in progress on a epub device, but I would hate for anyone to
send this quality of epub or html to either PG or archive.org
As an alternative one can try to get Marcello's epubmaker running on a
Windoze machine, which is somewhat of a pain, but once you do so you can
actually see more-or-less how your code is going to look after being
submitted to PG before submitting it to PG -- so if you're poking yourself
in the eye at least you'll know it.