Buddy, you say that NOW. I know you and I think that your head would explode after your 4th-5th book. ;-) If you even made it that far.

It seems like a perfect gig for a perfectionist...but, hell, ask Tex, the biggest perfectionist I know. He'll tell you and you KNOW he has mad formatting skills. Trust me.

Hitch

This is good to know. I might try compiling an ePub for PD Urdu poetry with an embedded nastaliq font instead of the much less appealing naksh that Unicode seems to default to. Since I can't actually read Urdu in anything other than Roman or devnagari, I would prefer maximum aesthetic value, and nastaliq delivers

Remember as Hitch mentioned, if you try to use a body font in an ebook sent to Amazon, it will vanish like the disposasteins of yesteryear. Set a chapter header font, no problems.

On the last ebook I saw that attempted to get around this, the author styled each paragraph with the embedded font using style= and it didn't work.

Thanks. It was mention of epub that caught my eye. This would be a hobby project, initially for my own education, but if the results were ok, i would be nice to be able to embed the font I chose for sharing the epub non-commercially with others I think might enjoy it

That ^ is exactly right. Amazon caught on to that trick ages ago (2013, by my personal knowledge) and there's a styling limit, inside the renderer (the publishing workflow renderers/processors) for style= or font=. Nukes it altogether.

We had this truly godawful book. It was...I can't even describe it. It was like a person's journal/memoir/something. And it careened from font to font. It also made extensive use of Arial. Well, like good little obedient doggies, we licensed the fonts and off we go and we could NOT NOT NOT get Arial to "take." Something about the usages, too many fonts, too much Arial in conjunction with (IDK what else).

Seriously, if you removed a paragraph with Arial, you could add one. We demonstrated it over and over. There appeared to be hard limit, in how many paragraphs you could have, in Arial. We tried normal CSS; we tried inline; we even tried putting it on the HTML tags (the customer was ADAMANT!), and we never got it to work. Use it all the time for headings and subheads, and for books where it's the only font...but there is something, somewhere, that makes it explode with a certain (number/type) of other fonts.

Most bizarre font thing--well, almost--that I ever saw. The Daily Prophet Effect--the one where the text appeared to come "unstuck" from the page and float around, in Previewer and on-sale--that was the MOST bizarre. We'd upload this perfectly normal novel, and when you'd preview it, the text of the book simply...came apart. And floated around the page, as if unanchored to lines, grids...weirdest thing ever. Customer as horribly unhappy with us. Never did figure out WHY.


Hitch

WTF. It's like pressing ENTER ENTER ENTER in your documents.

And this is in trade published books?

Report it.

... what? Are you serious?

I could maybe see a self-help book, programming book, or something like that... but a novel‽

Do it. Go to your favorite author, publisher, non-profit, etc... and clean it up for them.

There are plenty of abysmal ebooks out there that need reformatting.

Heck, that's how I got started.

Side Note: I even used this method in 2018:

I purchased an ebook from one of the podcasters I listen to.

He only had an Amazon/Kindle version for sale, so I wanted to create an EPUB so it could be sold on all the other stores.

Turns out it was a Word->Kindle conversion... and there were busted footnotes, broken URLs, and other issues.

I blew him away by pointing out tons of errors/typos.

He gave me the original source files, and I was able to generate a super clean, amazing EPUB (and better Kindle version too!).

Now he's one of my best clients/buddies, and I've done 6+ books for them (with more on the way).

But note, you'd probably want to be less abrasive with your "my way or the highway" demeanor.

Meh. You know regex.

So once you spot the pattern, it's usually just a handful of regex to normalize the text.

I just reduce everything down to the super-clean:

then run my usual Saved Searches on it to instantly produce the footnote code.

lol, but every book that's ever passed through JSWolf's clutches turns out perfectly crisp and clean! :D

In that entire Calibre library of his, there must be hundreds, thousands, millions! He's outproduced us all! :D

:thumbsup::thumbsup: