Hello everyone,
I've been the happy owner of a Kindle 3 for about 6 months now. I love it, and it's great that there are so many books available in the public domain for free. Only thing, as you probably all know, the formatting isn't always perfect in the books you can find around the web. So after spending some time reading them as-is, I quickly started spending some time trying to fix simple things in the ebooks I found—mainly adding TOC/correct chapter breaks, small tweaks in the CSS to change the indents or alignment, etc. (with Sigil that is, and doing the ePub/mobi conversion with Calibre).
I guess you can see where I'm going: the more I learned about ebooks, the more unsatisfied I was with the ones I had, and the more things I wanted to change in them.
A couple days ago, I finally found a text I had been searching for some time, in ePub format. Problem is: when I opened it, I noticed it was all in bold. So okay, I figured, I will just change the CSS. Then I noticed something strange (you will notice how little I know about ePubs): the "font-weight: bolder" tag was not in the "calibre2" class, which was used for every paragraph of the book, but it was in a "calibre3" class (that consister only of this "font-weight: bolder" tag).
When looking at the code view in Sigil, I noticed that every single paragraph of the book had those 2 classes called at the beginning: <p class="calibre2"><b class="calibre3">. My first reaction to get rid of the bold problem was simply to change the "font-weight" to put "normal" instead of "bolder". Doing this kinda fix the problem, but not in a very satisfying way I must admit: now I have a "calibre3" class that is exactly useless and is still called at the beginning of everything paragraph of the book...
My question is simple: what do you do in these circumstances? Remove all the <b class="calibre3">? Start a new clean file with the plain text?
Actually, I wouldn't really be asking if the problem was only this. Thing is, I realized that every paragraph was full of multiple and repetitive class calls (I don't know how to name this)... For example, here is one paragraph from the code view in Sigil:
Quote:
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<p class="calibre2"><b class="calibre3">— Fatime, dit-il à ma compagne, je suppose que cette jeune et jolie personne est</b> <b class="calibre3">au fait ; il ne me reste donc plus qu'à vous prévenir que nous avons pour convives</b> <b class="calibre3">deux vieux Allemands, à Paris depuis un mois, et qui brûlent du désir de connaître</b> <b class="calibre3">quelques jolies filles. L'un d'eux a pour vingt mille écus de diamants sur lui :</b> <b class="calibre3">Fatime, je te le recommande. L'autre, qui désire acheter une maison dans ce village,</b> <b class="calibre3">et à qui j'ai persuadé que je lui en trouverais une à très bon marché s'il apportait de</b> <b class="calibre3">quoi la payer comptant, aura sûrement plus de quarante mille francs dans sa poche,</b> <b class="calibre3">soit en or, soit en lettres à vue : Juliette, ce sera votre lot ; acquittez-vous bien de la</b> <b class="calibre3">mission et je vous ferai souvent faire de semblables parties.</b></p>
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I have no idea how a ePub can end up with such repetitive formatting... Since the book needs no special formatting (it's all just regular text), I want every paragraph to have only a single class called at the beginning. Is that the correct way to do this?
So at this point, what do you suggest is the simplest way to get a clean book? Just copy paste the "book view" of Sigil and start with the plain text a new ePub file? Or is there a way to remove all the unnecessary formatting?
Thanks in advance for your help (and for all the great information available on the forums), and sorry if I made some grammar/syntax mistakes—as you can maybe guess from the quoted paragraph, english isn't my first language.
Michael