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• • March 13, 2014 at 10:07 am #67650
    MacGene

    Member

    Hi all,

    I’ve searched through the forum, and can’t quite find the thread I’m looking for . . .

    I’ve been using an InDesign to Sigil workflow to do my epubs for several reasons:

    I can rename files output by InDesign and have their references automatically updated within all xhtml and other files;
    I can generate a Navigation TOC and create a Table of Contents xhtml file from style names;
    And this navigation generator will update the navMap entries in the TOC file;

    I am being introduced to Oxygen Author and am unable to locate, or ascertain, if any of these features are available, and how they work.

    Can anyone point me in the right direction?

  • March 21, 2014 at 4:57 am #67699
    Anonymous

    Inactive

    The good news is that you’ve made the right decision. Sigil puts things in your epub that prevent it from being a future-proof asset. oXygen is a much better epub editor.

    The bad news is that oXygen doesn’t automatically create the navigation elements of your epub. I have always been a little confused by people’s reliance on this feature of Sigil, however, especially if ID is part of your workflow and so you’ll have an auto-generated nav and toc.

    • March 22, 2014 at 6:33 am #67710
      MacGene

      Member

      Hi Laura,

      Thank you for your reply.

      To your point concerning navigation elements, that depends upon your InDesign workflow. If documents contain many chapters, or other elements, that will require separate xhtml files as output, InDesign exports them as “Document ID” (often just an ISBN) and a sequence of numbers, as in: “ISBN-1”; “ISBN-2”; etc. If you have thirty chapters, navigating through that (for either text or structural corrections) can be a nightmare. Because of author/editor and design workflow, taking the ms and chunking it up into separate chapter files is not an option. So, if you wish to rename the actual xhtml files, change their order, whatever, the ability to do that within the xhtml editor, and have that editor also manipulate the TOC and the CONTENT files automatically is crucial to efficiency.

      I use the TOC feature in InDesign to create styles for export, and to populate the NavMap in the TOC. I also make certain that all of my Chapter Openers (which determine the TOC) have their style tags renamed (paragraph styles “export tags to epub” feature) to [H1 CLASS=”ChapterOpenerStyle”] so that SIGIL will recognize them as Headers. I can then generate a TOC at any time, both a Navigational one, and, if need be, an inline file, without ever going back to the InDesign file.

      As far as I can tell, oXygen is an XML editor that can open an epub, and also generate html code.

      In addition, I have heard quite often that SIGIL introduces code that somehow affects the epub. I would love to see an example of that code. It can get messy if you have the automated code clean-up turned on, and YOUR code entries are consistently out of standard, but otherwise, the only thing I’ve seen is a reference to itself included in the HEAD.

      If you, or anyone else can show me some code examples, something to look for, I would greatly appreciate it. I do think the best solution would be for Adobe to come up with either a plugin or a sister app designed as a dedicated epub editor.

      thanks

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