[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by A Lurker

I'm looking at the example document. It appears that you use "Heading 1" for the chapter title; "Normal" for the first, non-indented paragraph; and "Normal (Web)" for all subsequent paragraphs. Is that correct?

Re: chapter headings - you will definitely benefit from using Word's built-in heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, ..., Heading 6) to define your Chapter/Sub-heading paragraphs. This is because you can tell calibre to use them during conversion to get a good TOC. See this part of calibre manual.

The sample RTF used 'Heading1' as a chapter heading, but for my own docs I prefer to use 'Heading 2' for chapter hdgs and 'Heading 3' for sub-hdgs, reserving 'Heading 1' for the book Title and Author only. This is purely personal choice, calibre won't mind which you use as long as you tell it in your conversion settings.

Re: non-indented paras - yes, for simplicity I just used the standard Normal style which, by default has a text-indent of zero. You can change it if you want.

Re: indented paras - I modified the 'Normal(Web)' style to have a first line indent. I think, by default, it has the same style as 'Normal'.

It's hard to explain why I've done it this way without getting into the nitty-gritty of saving docs as HTML rather than RTF. So I won't try for now.

Originally Posted by A Lurker

If I format my documents as described above, do I just then important them directly into Calibre (without converting them to web-filtered)? And then run the regular conversion to .mobi without making any preference changes?

You can save as RTF or web-filtered before importing into calibre for conversion, but web-filtered is likely to retain more of the finer points of any styling that you've applied in Word... Which leads me onto ...

I just noticed that in the sample "RTF_Test.mobi" document you attached there is a space between the paragraphs. That is what I'm desperately trying to avoid.

The space you see isn't blank lines it's a top and bottom margin on each paragraph. I think (someone correct me if I'm wrong) that conversions from RTF default to both top/bottom being set to 1em - which looks like blank lines between each paragraph.

There are several ways to get round this

• By using the ExtraCSS box on calibre's Convert - Look&Feel page. If you type in the following before you convert, the lines should 'close up'
  

  p {margin-top: 0; margin-bottom: 0}

• By converting to epub and using calibre's 'Tweak ebook' feature to manually edit the epub's internal css file (in a simple text editor) to get rid of the unwanted top/bottom margins. Then convert the epub to mobi.
  
  Note: I think if your final destination format is new mobi (KF8, azw3) rather than old mobi, then you should be able to go direct from RTF to mobi without using epub as an interim format, because you can also use 'Tweak ebook' to directly edit the css file in a KF8/azw3. I'm not a Kindle user though so what I'm saying is theoretical.
• By saving your Word doc as web-filtered HTML rather than RTF. If you do this there is a better chance that the top/bottom paragraph margins (and other styling) you set in Word, will be retained in the HTML and hence honoured in the conversion, i.e. you wouldn't need to type anything in the ExtraCSS box.
  
  I need to add a caveat here. Using Word to create clean simple HTML is a bit of a black art. It can create very messy HTML code. This doesn't mean calibre won't be able to create epubs/mobis which are perfectly acceptable to you for reading, but some people like the inside to look as neat as the outside

That's probably enough to be going on with. BTW I was in your position 3-years ago, trying to figure out the best way of getting Word to play nicely with calibre. It didn't take me long to realise that learning a little bit of html/css is essential if you're at all picky about how your ebooks look. It's probably not what you want to hear right now, but I'm afraid, as they say, resistance is futile

[Edit: damn... too late... could have saved myself some typing if I'd seen your last post.]