Conversion Help Please - HTML to ePub

[PocketGoddess]

I've got quite a few HTML books that I'm trying to convert using Calibre.

They just don't come out right, mainly because the files are in pretty bad shape. I'm hoping to make this as easy as possible, and was thrilled when a recent update of Calibre promised to "smarten punctuation" and "transliterate unicode characters to ASCII."

I thought those setting would solve some of my problems; right now I have "'" instead of apostrophes, "": for quotation marks, etc. My files also have br tags instead of standard p tags, etc. so I know it's going to take a lot of work in order to get them cleaned up enough to run through Calibre, unless there are some settings I'm missing.

I've read the tutorials, but they're all about table of contents and other fancy stuff that will be nice for the future, but I'm not worried about it now--I just want to be able to read my books.

Perhaps I need a table of character codes to look for, so that I can get my punctuation all cleaned up using search and replace in a text editor?

If there is some other tutorial I may have missed, please point me in the right direction. Any help appreciated!

[kovidgoyal]

see http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual...r-smart-quotes