i said:

bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

i have to remember to sprinkle in a smiley or two, every once in a while, just to remind all of you that i do indeed write every post with a smile on my face. :+) and yes, i get exasperated, and frustrated, but i also have a good time, because what else is there in life? besides, some of the crap that people try to pull here is -- quite honestly -- extremely amusing, at least to me. and so it is that i take up the latest message from greg... *** greg said:

You're fractionally wrong. We often forward such reports to Marcello (sometimes others) so that they can use it as feedback towards improvements.

you should document that process, so we could actually _see_ that improvements are being made, however slowly.

But generally you are right. My response when such things arrive in help@'s mailbox is along the lines of: - our auto-conversion is not always accurate, and is particularly thrown off by some fancy layout that is found in some of our HTML; and - we do not currently have a mechanism to tune those files, or add custom fixes to the collection, however, - we are hoping to have such capabilities in the future.

ok, greg, are you tone-deaf? :+) <--smiley do you know how that sounds to people out there? it sounds like you don't care. or let me put it to you as robert gibbins recalled it:

The response at the time could probably be summarised as "yes, we know about that, go away"

we know. now go. that's the message you're sending. your response sounds as if it was generated by some mid-level bureaucrat in the bowels of the politburo... even worse is how it totally displaces responsibility. your conversions suck because your converter sucks. let me repeat that. because it needs to sink in: your conversions suck because your converter sucks. no, it's not because of the "fancy layout" in the .html, which your volunteers submit, which would officially make it "their" fault, in the mind of marcello, anyway. no, it's primarily because marcello's converter sucks. is the .html to blame as well? of course. definitely. but guess what? that's _your_ fault too! at least it's juliet's fault. i made it perfectly clear, to _everyone_, that her "you can do stuff however you like" recruiting of postprocessors was gonna bite all of you in the butt, as soon as you had to rework their files for any reason, but y'all ignored my advice, and now y'all are suffering the consequences of your willful choice of that option... that's _your_ fault. not their fault. _you_ are to blame. you allowed d.p. postprocessors to make "snowflakes", instead of consistent books with dependable markup, so now you have to live with the ramifications of that. but don't blame them for your mistake. take the blame. and accept the responsibility that now you will have to include their "design preferences" within the workflow you want them to adopt. because you have no choice. their only "reward" for postprocessing those d.p. texts is that they can make their .html product "look nice"... they're accustomed to that, and you can't take it away. if you did, you would lose 90% of your postprocessors. you'll lose some of 'em just by _trying_ to take it away. or by dumping a system on them without consultation. you should have made them active contributors from the very _beginning_ of the process, for it to succeed. you put 'em in charge; now you can't boss 'em around. *** but the worst part of all is that your workflow is stupid. .rst was a lousy choice. (which is why i laid that trap.) and marcello's typically graceless implementation isn't helping your cause. (who ever thought that it would?) and, lest we forget, the output you generate is _crap_. then, to top it off, you ignore some good suggestions! an example of that is in this post to which i'm replying, which is a response to a suggestion coming from jim... he informs you that his tests showed that:

I have confirmed that changing the [p] formatting statement in the css from: margin-top: 0.50em; margin-bottom: 0.50em; to: margin-top: 0.51em; margin-bottom: 0.49em; is in fact a reasonable practical solution to the problem.

i assume this is for the kindle, since it comes from jim, and since the kindle does funky stuff with the margins. so how should you respond to this? you should say something very much like this:

thank you so much for doing this sleuthing! we're going to go confirm that this fix works, on the kindle, and doesn't have any bad effect on any of the other formats we auto-generate. this might take a little time, but if it does work, we will confirm that to you within a few hours, and have the change incorporated by tomorrow. and again, thanks for figuring out this glitch! please let us know about other improvements that we can make. we appreciate your input...

that's how you should respond to a suggestion like that. to _every_ suggestion that will improve your conversions. with _immediate_ feedback and testing and incorporation. because those awful conversions are the most important problem on your radar-screen at this point in time, greg. i shouldn't have to tell you how many .epubs and .mobis are being downloaded while we debate this issue to death. you need to _act_, and you need to act _right_now_... go! and get back to this list that you made jim's change today! -bowerbird