Help with horribly formatted epub?

[bfollowell]

I have an epub that someone did a totally horrible formatting job on. Rather than have each paragraph defined as, of all things, a paragraph, basically each chapter is a paragragh with breaks and extra line spacing between what should be paragraphs. I've tried to clean it up a little by converting with Calibre but have had no luck at all. Since each chapter is really just one giant paragraph, there is no way to remove the extra spacing between the paragraph groups. They aren't really paragraphs as far as Calibre is concerned so there's nothing to remove.

I'm almost afraid to ask but, is there an easy way to removed all these breaks and clean this up or am I basically going to have to edit this whole 500 page book by hand in order to clean it up?

I'd love to hear any advice anyone may have to offer.

Thanks.

- Byron Followell

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

I have an epub that someone did a totally horrible formatting job on. Rather than have each paragraph defined as, of all things, a paragraph, basically each chapter is a paragragh with breaks and extra line spacing between what should be paragraphs. I've tried to clean it up a little by converting with Calibre but have had no luck at all. Since each chapter is really just one giant paragraph, there is no way to remove the extra spacing between the paragraph groups. They aren't really paragraphs as far as Calibre is concerned so there's nothing to remove.

I'm almost afraid to ask but, is there an easy way to removed all these breaks and clean this up or am I basically going to have to edit this whole 500 page book by hand in order to clean it up?

I'd love to hear any advice anyone may have to offer.

Thanks.

- Byron Followell

Kinda hard to come up with a precise solution just from your description.

Are you looking at the file in Code View?
Are these line spaces: <br /> You could try replacing each one with a </p> <p> <- Note you are ending the previous and starting another.

Also note that a replace All may get the few legitimate "Breaks" in the overhaul.

Second pass, then you need to decide what to do with multiple "empty Paragraphs (<p></p>) that are left.

Other than that, you might need to craft a regex that "finds the uniqueness" of those breaks.
For each successful "cleaning pass", do a save. Abort (reload without save) if you get undesired results.
Clean in little fixes and multiple passes instead of trying for "just one Replace"


BTW:
Have you tried saving the file as a Text (no HTML, Looks as it would print), then have Calibre convert using the best choice:
1) treat multiple blank lines as para markers.
2)removing extra blank lines and treat indents as Para markers

[bfollowell]

Originally Posted by theducks

BTW:
Have you tried saving the file as a Text (no HTML, Looks as it would print), then have Calibre convert using the best choice:
1) treat multiple blank lines as para markers.
2)removing extra blank lines and treat indents as Para markers

Thanks for the advice. I'll try the replace slowly and see how it goes. It will still be a long, drawn-out process but not quite the same as taking care of each paragraph manually.

And, no I really don't want to try converting to text because then I'll lose what good formatting was done (bold, italics, etc.)

Thanks for your help.

We'll see if anyone comes up with something more.

- Byron

[bfollowell]

Well, your suggestion helped me a lot more than I thought it might when I saw it initially. Basically, I just went in, pulled up a typical chapter and did a search for:

</span><br />
<br />
<span

This is the common code between two typical paragraphs. I found 230 occurrences. I replaced them all with:

</p>
<p

I fixed the first and last paragraphs by hand and that pretty much took care of the worst of it. There'll be some more tweaking and cleaning to get it just right and I'm sure a few things may get messed up but this will take care of the bulk of my problems a lot faster than I was worried it might take me.

Thanks again for your suggestion.

- Byron

[theducks]

Originally Posted by bfollowell

Well, your suggestion helped me a lot more than I thought it might when I saw it initially. Basically, I just went in, pulled up a typical chapter and did a search for:

</span><br />
<br />
<span

This is the common code between two typical paragraphs. I found 230 occurrences. I replaced them all with:

</p>
<p

I fixed the first and last paragraphs by hand and that pretty much took care of the worst of it. There'll be some more tweaking and cleaning to get it just right and I'm sure a few things may get messed up but this will take care of the bulk of my problems a lot faster than I was worried it might take me.

Thanks again for your suggestion.

- Byron

Glad it worked out.