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pckopp · 08-29-2010, 01:36 PM

Thanks for your thoughts.

I can't find any combination of "Treat each line as a paragraph" in TXT Input or "Remove spacing between paragraphs" in Look & Feel that will do what your #2 example above shows. All combinations of those yield what is essentially one paragraph.

In the online user manual under Conversion, there is a section on Paragraph spacing. It describes the actions as I think you and I understand them. But the last sentence of that section is:
"The one exception is when the input file uses hard line breaks to implement inter-paragraph spacing."

I don't know what Calibre considers a 'hard line break'; I even tried changing the (cr)(lf) ends to just (lf) but it made no difference.

Since that is the last sentence, there is no further explanation of what happens. What does follow is a description of how to use CSS and a source XHTML file to get irregular paragraph spacing.

More searching in the forum reveals several more threads on this topic. My impression is that going from plain-text to what I want probably isn't possible. txt to rtf to epub / mobi looks a bit more promising. I opened my original txt file with Windows WordPad and saved it as rtf. Then I used Calibre to convert the rtf to mobi and got nearly what I was looking for. If I used Calibre to convert to rtf and then that to epub / mobi I did not get what I wanted. Interesting.

My interest in this stems from the fact that there are a _lot_ of ebooks floating around that are horribly formatted. Somewhere there must be an automated tool of some sort that is really bad. IMO. I think a nice clean document to read is worth a few minutes in the editor(s). I realize Calibre is not an editor, but still a great tool.

08-29-2010, 01:36 PM	#12
pckopp Enthusiast Posts: 32 Karma: 44 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: Seneca, SC Device: Kindle, eReader	Thanks for your thoughts. I can't find any combination of "Treat each line as a paragraph" in TXT Input or "Remove spacing between paragraphs" in Look & Feel that will do what your #2 example above shows. All combinations of those yield what is essentially one paragraph. In the online user manual under Conversion, there is a section on Paragraph spacing. It describes the actions as I think you and I understand them. But the last sentence of that section is: "The one exception is when the input file uses hard line breaks to implement inter-paragraph spacing." I don't know what Calibre considers a 'hard line break'; I even tried changing the (cr)(lf) ends to just (lf) but it made no difference. Since that is the last sentence, there is no further explanation of what happens. What does follow is a description of how to use CSS and a source XHTML file to get irregular paragraph spacing. More searching in the forum reveals several more threads on this topic. My impression is that going from plain-text to what I want probably isn't possible. txt to rtf to epub / mobi looks a bit more promising. I opened my original txt file with Windows WordPad and saved it as rtf. Then I used Calibre to convert the rtf to mobi and got nearly what I was looking for. If I used Calibre to convert to rtf and then that to epub / mobi I did not get what I wanted. Interesting. My interest in this stems from the fact that there are a _lot_ of ebooks floating around that are horribly formatted. Somewhere there must be an automated tool of some sort that is really bad. IMO. I think a nice clean document to read is worth a few minutes in the editor(s). I realize Calibre is not an editor, but still a great tool.