Editing existing html causes loss of title page

[FoggyKernel]

I am relative newbie at using Calibre. I am a mac user and I have an iPad Pro that I use to hold most of my manuals, white papers, etc.

I have created an epub doc from an existing word docx file and while reviewing it I noticed that some minor issues. Instead of just deleting the book, editing the docx then recreating the book I chose to use Calibre's editor since most of the changes were very minor (spelling changes, incorrect word uses, verb tenses, etc).

That went very well, then I saved everything and verified my changes were in the epub document. I then reloaded it to my book app on my macbook I notice that the title page had changed. I had created my own title page as a PNG file that was added to the docx in the title page. Calibre had taken this and made it the title page of the book. But now I have the default title page (dark grey, white lettering) now showing when it did show the correct title page.

Did I do something incorrectly? I do not see anything (yet) in the Calibre manual.

Thanks,

Patrick Mahan

[Quoth]

On Calibre there is an option on docx import to "Don't detect cover from file".
Also if you have a docx:
1) Always edit the docx (or if LO Writer edit odt and extra Save As docx)
2) During development always SaveAs with incremented version number before changes to docx already as epub.
3) Always go Metadata and delete the docx after conversion to epub
4) Always make all other formats from epub
5) Trivial to import fresh edited docx in Metadata window and delete old epub & other formats.

I only edit the epub in Calibre (if the source is wordprocessor) to tweak image CSS as I can't get graphics style in wp to have a % width or height and other auto that's recognised in Calibre as CSS. All the headings and paragraph etc styles map perfectly to css.

A long time since I used a Mac, but I think LibreOffice is a better choice now than MS Office (Word), and free for a Mac as MS is more focused on Office365 on Web. Better PDF export. But you need to save/edit any imported docx as odt and fix page, heading, graphics & paragraph styles and only edit odt. The spreadsheet isn't so fussy. I switched to LO completely on Windows in 2014 or 2015 and then to Linux completely by Jan 2017.

[lomkiri]

Originally Posted by FoggyKernel

But now I have the default title page (dark grey, white lettering) now showing when it did show the correct title page

You may easily fix this in the editor (without having to go back to docx and thus to loose your corrections) : menu tools / add a cover / button "import img"
(I always check "preserve ratio" too)

[FoggyKernel]

Originally Posted by Quoth

On Calibre there is an option on docx import to "Don't detect cover from file".
Also if you have a docx:
1) Always edit the docx (or if LO Writer edit odt and extra Save As docx)
2) During development always SaveAs with incremented version number before changes to docx already as epub.
3) Always go Metadata and delete the docx after conversion to epub
4) Always make all other formats from epub
5) Trivial to import fresh edited docx in Metadata window and delete old epub & other formats.

I only edit the epub in Calibre (if the source is wordprocessor) to tweak image CSS as I can't get graphics style in wp to have a % width or height and other auto that's recognised in Calibre as CSS. All the headings and paragraph etc styles map perfectly to css.

A long time since I used a Mac, but I think LibreOffice is a better choice now than MS Office (Word), and free for a Mac as MS is more focused on Office365 on Web. Better PDF export. But you need to save/edit any imported docx as odt and fix page, heading, graphics & paragraph styles and only edit odt. The spreadsheet isn't so fussy. I switched to LO completely on Windows in 2014 or 2015 and then to Linux completely by Jan 2017.

Thanks for the tips! As I stated, I am a newbie having only started changing to using Calibre. I use MS Word (not the cloud version) because I have a access to lots of documents (Software Design, Architecture internals, etc) that are all in docx format. I originally used the PDF in iBook but found it has various issues. So I wanted to change to using epub format and found Calibre and made a few conversions which seemed to go well. This was the first time I decided to try the editor tool (I previously had used the edit docx and recreate). Thanks for pointing out I could do this via the metadata without needing to "remove" and "add".

Patrick

[FoggyKernel]

Originally Posted by lomkiri

You may easily fix this in the editor (without having to go back to docx and thus to loose your corrections) : menu tools / add a cover / button "import img"
(I always check "preserve ratio" too)

Yes, I believe I am going to convert to using this method as most of these docx files have a title page that is not converted very well, aside from grabbing the image from that page. I have now started to creating my own and importing them as you suggest.