Preserving <br /> on epub -> txt conversion

[billingd]

Does calibre have an option to preserve <br /> breaks when exporting from epub to txt? I have looked but can't find one.

I am trying to preserve the formatting of poetry, etc embedded in a book.

The current behavior is (roughly) a conversion from

<p>line 1,<br/>
line 2,<br/>
line 3,<br/>
line 4.</p>

to

line 1, line 2, line 3, line 4.

I want

line 1,
line 2,
line 3,
line 4.

I have attached a simple test case. epub is input and txt is output.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by billingd

Does calibre have an option to preserve <br /> breaks when exporting from epub to txt? I have looked but can't find one.

I am trying to preserve the formatting of poetry, etc embedded in a book.

Most folks are trying to create a way to do flowable text that doesn't screw up poetry in ePubs. Kovid even gave us a nice demo.epub that we can view in Sigil to see how basic things can be encoded so they will look good in the ePub format. Why you would want to go backwards is beyond me.

I couldn't do it in just calibre and still have the space between verses.

The only way I found to do this reliably is to use calibre to convert to RTF and then use Wordpad to convert the RTF to text. I attached two formatted epubs (with the resultant RTF and Text files) that use different methods to get the space between verses. One uses Non-breaking spaces in a paragraph tag and the other uses all <br /> line breaks. The one with non-breaking spaces uses paragraph tags on all the lines.

Take a look.