EPUB Export, Sigil, and Calibre
The Calligra-produced EPUB imported quite nicely into Sigil but failed to provide working links and didn't display images. As a medium for just text with footnotes, endnotes, and visuals, EPUB from Calligra Words is great though if you want superfluous navigation and visuals, you might want to tweak the XHTML using Sigil. The text formatting and styles were retained and consistent. There were a few odd marks before the Reference section and the formatting for the Table of Contents required editing.
Using Sigil's FlightCrew Validation tool, I checked if the EPUB was compliant. As expected, there were several non-compliant XML names/ids which needed changing but nothing that would prevent the EPUB from being read on an EPUB device (the names were auto-generated when the .odt was exported to EPUB). Renaming the XML ids would take less than 10 minutes in Sigil or even less on a dedicated XML editor.
For those who use CSS in their EPUBs, the exported Calligra document actually creates CSS based on the styles you used in Calligra Words. Writers can easily edit the CSS (if needed) using Sigil. Required fonts can also be packaged later with the EPUB using Sigil.
KDE Errors
As a footnote for Linux and FreeBSD users, Calligra Suite doesn't work perfectly on a non-KDE desktop environment. Calligra Words crashed several times on my Fedora 18 Xfce system until I manually deleted a few associated Nepomuk files (Nepomuk File Indexing Controller and Nepomuk Server) and stopped a running KDE service (kactivitymanagerd).
Calligra's applications are generally lighter than its LibreOffice counterparts but Words stuttered a few times, particularly when I was creating a table of contents. I attribute this to my running the application in Xfce rather than its native KDE environment. Usage in Mageia 3 KDE didn't have the same symptoms however.
Bottomline
EPUB compatibility - I tested the EPUB exported from Calligra Words using Calibre's Ebook Viewer, Okular, Sigil and two EPUB-compliant plugins for Mozilla Firefox. Okular, Sigil, and Calibre's Ebook viewer successfully displayed the test EPUB. Mozilla Firefox's excellent EPUBReader Add-on was able to open the EPUB (and display the Endnotes too), but Google Chrome's LEKT, which checks for EPUB compliance and mimetype, failed to display the EPUB.
Text formatting,navigation and document consistency in EPUB
Text formatting was retained and was definitely usable (and much better formatted than some of the documents you can download from Scribd and Archive.org). I was especially happy how the endnotes, footnotes, and bibliography was displayed. However, as mentioned in the previous section, the table of contents and links weren't retained and images didn't display though Sigil reported the images were packaged with the resulting EPUB file. For text-only documents such as textbooks, treatises, and proposal reports, Words would be an excellent application especially if the final document output is EPUB. For a mixed EPUB output of SVG, images, and HTML, however, Calligra Words needs a bit of work.Conclusion? For writers eager for an EPUB word processor, Calligra has potential though there is a bit of a learning curve and I only recommend working on text. Once exported to EPUB with all the text formatting, switch to Sigil to correct XML inconsistencies, create a table of contents, add links, meta data, and images. The creation of CSS from Calligra Words is definitely a plus for those who don't intend to write their own CSS formatting in Sigil. Though the roundabout procedure of having to edit the Calligra EPUB in Sigil after exporting may be off-putting for some, the process is much simpler than it seems and fairly easy if you understand XHTML and know how to use Sigil.
For my part, I would probably still use a basic note-taking/text editor or work directly in Sigil. However, if the developers manage to fix some of the EPUB export issues of Calligra Words, then I would certainly consider the application as a contender.
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