Formatting issue converting eReader PDB e-books

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by ChristopherTD

Generally my experience has been that soft scene breaks are lost and just the normal paragraph spacing appears. But it has been a long time since I converted my PDB books, so I might wait on 0.7.45 and try some of the new goodness!

If I read it right the preliminary new goodness is in 0.7.44

New Features

• Heuristics: Improved Scene break detection and add option to control what scene breaks are replaced by.

[user_none]

0.7.44 should include the PML input changes to retain soft scene breaks. 0.7.45 has some tweaks tp make detection mre reliable. As always if there are issues this is good place to discus and if there is a bug, the bug tracker is the place to report bugs so they dont get lost.

Also, with 0.7.45 the soft scene breaks will be preserved in PML (eReader PDB) output too.

I did notice that the eReader software (I didnt check with the B&N branded one) will condense 2(?) blank lines into one. So a PML document will need at least 3 blank lines for soft scene breaks. As noted earlier \c \c seems to be often used with soft scene breaks.

[diamante]

Now I've converted a series of eReader PDB e-books in which there are no soft scene breaks at all. In the original e-books, the first paragraph of each chapter is not indented while other paragraphs have first-line indentation. When I convert the PDBs to EPUB format, the first paragraph of each chapter looks fine, but instead of first-line indentation all other paragraphs are fully indented from the left margin.

Is this a bug, or do I just need to change some settings to get the EPUBs to come out like the originals? In addition to only indenting the first line of each paragraph except the first paragraph of each chapter, can I set Calibre not to insert extra space between paragraphs? This is not as important as the indentation issue, of course, but I'd like to see if I can get the converted e-books to look as much like the originals as possible.

[user_none]

Originally Posted by diamante

When I convert the PDBs to EPUB format, the first paragraph of each chapter looks fine, but instead of first-line indentation all other paragraphs are fully indented from the left margin.

Sounds like a bug but I can't tell without the file. Please open a ticket and attach the file.


My guess is your book is doing something like:

\tO\tnce upon at time...

I've seen books that do this and while it sometimes works depending on the reader but it's invalid. According to the PML spec, "\t = Indent block. Start at beginning of a line, close with \t at end of a line." Invalid formatting is pretty much a guess of how it should look.

[diamante]

Originally Posted by user_none

Sounds like a bug but I can't tell without the file. Please open a ticket and attach the file.

The original file is DRM-protected, but here is a sample from the PML, cut and pasted from a text editor (with my comments as the "text"); this e-book is using tab stops instead of first-line indentation:

This is the last sentence of a chapter.
\p 


\X1\B\c2
\c\B\X1Here begins the first paragraph of the next chapter. This paragraph is not indented.
\T="10%"Subsequent paragraphs look like this. They are supposed to have first-line indentation (and they appear to in eReader; in eBook Studio they have a 10% tab stop at the beginning of each paragraph, but no indentation) but when converted they are block indented.
\T="10%"New paragraph here, same story for all paragraphs except the first paragraph of each chapter.

[user_none]

I've pushed up changes to the handling of \t and \T tags. There is no way to get them 100% mapped to XHTML unfortunately. \t and \T can do some very strange things and are highly dependent fix positions within the viewer screen. So, only certain, common cases are handled.

• \t starting and ending a line (or another line) will create a hard margin indent.
• \t starting a line and ending anywhere before the end will create a text indent.
• \T starting a line will create a text indent.
• \t sets and \T inside of a line will be ignored.

\tText ... end of Text\t

will produce

    Text
    ...
    end of text

---

\tText ...
end of Text\t

will produce

    Text
    ...
    end of text

---

\tT\text ... end of Text

will produce

    Text
...
end of text

---

\T="5%"Text ... end of Text

will produce

    Text
...
end of text

---

Text ... \tend\t of\T="5%" Text

will produce

Text
...
end of Text

* I'm using the ... in place of a long string of text to denote how it will appear when wrapped.

[diamante]

That looks great! Thanks very much for addressing the issue, and for the detailed explanation.

[bfollowell]

Originally Posted by dwig

I've found both what I think of as "soft" scene breaks (extra blank space) and "hard" scene breaks (extra space with an ornament, three asterisks, or horizontal rule) in books. Usually a book uses one style or the other, but I've seen the occasional book, both printed and ebook, that use both, one indicating a small jump and the other a larger one.

With print books at least, it has been my experience that there is rarely any difference between what you're calling a soft break and a hard break other than where they happen to fall on a page. Where a break would fall somewhere within a page, these breaks typically just have a larger space, though some books couple this with no indentation on the first new paragraph following the break. The breaks with the asterisks or some other symbol are almost always used only where the break falls at the very top or bottom of a page. Other than that, there's typically not really any difference in the severity or importance of the break. Far more often than not, it's just a positional/typesetting thing and most books that I read use both.

Now, that's not to say some certain book or publisher may not use this differently and I'm certain I've read the occasional book that does, but I think these are in the minority.

- Byron

[user_none]

Both are scene breaks and serve the same purpose. However, they are indicated using differnt typographical techniques. We are making the distinction because we have to use different techiques to determine if we have encountered one or the other when parsing the text.

[diamante]

Once again, problem fixed. I'm loving Calibre and user_none! Thank you thank you thank you.