Span Span Span Span

[MULTIVAC]

I frequently see epubs that have multiple spans-within spans-within spans-within spans ad nauseum. This goes on all through the file in every paragraph. I imagine this comes from the file being converted from some other format to epub. Other than looking ugly as heck and being extremely difficult to edit, does this kind of multiple nested spans affect how the file will perform on most readers? And is there an easy way to clean this kind of mess?

example:

<p class="calibre25"><span class="calibre26"><span class="calibre23"><a class="calibre24"><span class="calibre21"><span class="calibre27">The actual text</span></span></a></span></span></p>

[JSWolf]

That is soke nasty looking code. Chances are it came from a conversion of an old Mobi. The code in old Mobi can be that nasty.

It could be slower to render, but on most modern Readers such as your T2, you won't notice it.

Personally, I'd give the code a good going over to get rid of all that garbage and redo the CSS so it matches what is supposed to happen. It's not that difficult if you can make use of search/replace/regex to get rid of the unwanted code.

[PeterT]

In theory shouldn't one also look at the various CSS classes being used and ensure that any styling in them is combined?

[EowynCarter]

The one time i saw that, happened to be calibre generated code.

[Ghitulescu]

I presume this comes from a document where, before converting in calibre, contains a lot of formatting.

[PeterT]

Originally Posted by EowynCarter

The one time i saw that, happened to be calibre generated code.

Hmm... whatever makes you think that... Maybe the inclusion of all the class="calibre..."

[EowynCarter]

Originally Posted by PeterT

Hmm... whatever makes you think that... Maybe the inclusion of all the class="calibre..."

Ah ! I didn't saw the example there was showing the calibre class. (Read too fast)
And yeah, that's when i looked at the css and saw that.

[odedta]

This code is really easy to get rid of just but simple search & replace in Calibre for:

<span class="calibre26">

then

<span class="calibre27">

and so on and so forth, after you're done you're left with a lot of </span>'s so just use "Beautify all files" function and voila, youre HTML files are clean.

If you get some more annoying code such as:

<p id="block_1"><b class="calibre_pb_1"></b></p>

in the next file you might see:

<p id="block_2"><b class="calibre_pb_2"></b></p>

notice the running numbers.. what you want to do is use regex search & replace (also available in calibre) and it goes like this:
Search for:

<p id="block_[0-9]*"><b class="calibre_pb_[0-9]*"></b></p>

Voila! those silly page breaks calibre makes are gone.

As for fixing the styling back to place, most of those spans calibre creates are repeated styling and usually contains only 2 rules, so it's rather easy to look at the CSS and see what kind of styling was applied on those spans and put them into the

<p class="calibre25">

calibre25 css style.