HTML to EPUB - Way to Make it Pretty?

[PocketGoddess]

I have some HTML books that are completely plain, no formatting.

I can live with them, though they are pretty hard to read since there's no paragraphs indents, etc.

Is it possible to do some custom CSS in calibre to clean things up and make them overall more readable? Or some other option? I've considered search and replace for example, to put in some more code, but any ideas would be great.

I've been using Calibre for a while, love it, but I'm still organizing my library and just getting into some of the more advanced stuff like conversion.

If there's an idiot's guide or anyone has done this before and knows how to set it up, I would appreciate any help at all that you can provide.

[capidamonte]

You should probably learn a bit about HTML (and CSS), and take a look at your source files. Prettify them and all your conversions will be better.

cap

[PocketGoddess]

Originally Posted by capidamonte

You should probably learn a bit about HTML (and CSS), and take a look at your source files. Prettify them and all your conversions will be better.

cap

I was hoping for something a little more concrete. I'm pretty good with HTML myself and I've talked to two CSS masters and a programmer friend who's just way smarter than me and they didn't have any suggestions for exactly what to do for indents and such.

[banjomike]

I tend to use OpenOffice. Load the html, save as odt, load odt, edit as a normal, non-web, document with all the formatting you could wish. And Calibre is good with odt. Mostly.

[capidamonte]

Originally Posted by PocketGoddess

I was hoping for something a little more concrete. I'm pretty good with HTML myself and I've talked to two CSS masters and a programmer friend who's just way smarter than me and they didn't have any suggestions for exactly what to do for indents and such.

Then take apart a hand-crafted epub book from the collection here on Mobileread, one that does what you would like to do, and check out their CSS and markup.

There are plenty that achieve a remarkable amount. Indenting, drop caps, stylized breaks, first word, first paragraph, lots of other effects.

For the best result, you're going to need to hand code.

cap

ps: or try Sigil, but wait for the 2.3 version this week that will deal with a code-view/book-view syncing bug.

[pietvo]

Let's hope your HTML does have paragraphs. You could then use some CSS like this:

p {
    text-indent: 2em;
    margin-top: 4px;
    margin-bottom: 2px;
}

This sets the paragraph indent to 2em (twice the width of the letter M in the current font), 2 pixels spacing above and 2 pixels spacing below the paragraph. Normally you would only use one of these. The units can als be cm, mm, in, and a couple of others.