Human memory is associative. Incredibly associative. A whiff of fragrance drifting on the wind can make you remember that date that was a horrible trainwreck, but resulted in you meeting your partner. A few notes of music can help you remember the mathematical formula that you first learned while listening to that piece of music.

It works the other way, too. Sometimes when I’m writing, the mental outline for a chapter, or some key event in that chapter, or a single line, may make me think of a piece of music. And if that piece of music fits the tone of the chapter, or a single line from it resonates strongly with what I’m writing just then ... well, then the title of that song, or a line from it, may become the chapter title.

Because associative memory. It’s just part of how humans work.

So you don't want to give money to Microsoft, and you want a good word processor. OK, that's easy. LibreOffice. Done.

Now you want to produce your own EPUB format eBooks. Well, that's OK, LibreOffice has an EPUB export. Simple, right? And the EPUBs it generates work. But ... they have some issues. Which you want to fix.

So you go into the EPUB.

DEAR MOTHER OF HASTUR RIDING ON A FLAMING VELOCIRAPTOR, WHAT IN THE NAME OF EVERYTHING CURSED AND UNHOLY AM I LOOKING AT?

LibreOffice generates atrocious EPUBs.

Or, more accurately, LibreOffice hands off the job to libepubgen. Which is a piece of alpha-quality v0.1.1 abandonware that hasn't seen a single code commit in three years. What it generates technically works, but dear gods, it is a Superfund site of bad markup.

"Please tell me there's a solution to this!"

There is a solution to this.

The solution is to install a tool called pandoc. That's not the WHOLE solution, because pandoc's .ODT reader has some serious bugs. BUT: If you save a copy of your LibreOffice .ODT document in .DOCX format, you can then use pandoc to convert that DOCX file to EPUB (actually, you should specify -t epub3), and you will end up with an EPUB 3.0 eBook that it is meaningfully humanly possible to edit and format.

And then, basically all you should need to do is go in and fix up the CSS to make it look the way you want it to look. (You may need to do a few manual fix-ups. LibreOffice's DOCX export has a bad habit of inserting hard line breaks at page ends, for some god-only-knows reason.)

Yes, believe it or not, English has rules of grammar… even when it seems they are honored more in the violation than in the observance.

Nevertheless, there are formal standards. Established standards. Like all standards, they are set by bodies quite certain that they know how English should be written.

Now, a technical standard is one thing. And even those constantly change. When they change, they are updated. There is usually little room for argument over whether the change is correct and for a good reason.

The English language is much more fluid and ambiguous. Every historical attempt to “police” the English language has failed. The language keeps changing underneath the rules. The rules don’t, in the end, dictate how English is spoken or written (although the rulemakers persist in trying to). Instead, the best one can hope to do it describe what is considered the current best practice of how it is written and spoken.

And sometimes that means they are wrong, because they do not reflect how actual users of the language are speaking and writing it. The fact that the rules CHANGE from time to time necessarily means that the rulemakers themselves agree from time to time that some of their rules are wrong.

Today, I speak specifically of the em dash—the long dash signifying a brief pause between words.

In the sentence above, I used it according to the current “official” grammar standard. Which is to way, with no whitespace around it.

But in this case, I believe the standard is wrong.

Why?

Several reasons.

For one thing, in a monospaced/fixed-pitch font, an em dash is often almost indistinguishable from a hyphen. Which potentially confuses readers.

For another, the “no whitespace around an em dash” rule flattens nuance. Whitespace, properly used, has MEANING. And a flat “no whitespace” rule takes away that meaning.

Consider the following two examples:

“I — don’t know,” I said.

“I— I don’t know,” I said.

The first line conveys a momentary pause in speech. The second gives a much stronger sense of speech abruptly broken off, then continued. Remove the whitespace, and a lot of that is lost.

“I—don’t know,” I said.

“I—I don’t know,” I said.

The nuance is gone.

So, sometimes I have yielded on this particular rule, and followed it. But I don’t like how it looks. So, more often, I have ignored it, and used whitespace in the way that I think looks right.

I am the writer here, and I insist it is MY privilege to decide how I will use the language, to convey the things I intend to convey.