well it seems this is my week for bizarre conversion headaches, but who knows, maybe i will be really lucky, and this one will be as easy to fix as the last one...
i bought the book
The Professor and the Madman in LIT format to convert to imp using the LIT2SB utility (thanks Nick !). in the past i have had very good results with this (including on DRM lit files, like this one) however this time...
- the
html file looks perfect when displayed in a browser.
- the
html file looks ok with minor fixes when opened in Word and saved as a .doc file, except that the first time i did that i found there was a page break after EVERY SINGLE PARAGRAPH (including one-line paragraphs, like in the TOC...). once i removed those it works ok.
- the
imp file generated from the html file (automatically by LIT2SB or using eBook Publisher) looks like crap !!! the text is aligned sometimes to the left but usually to the right with a strange, large and variable left margin, the whole first chapter (and maybe more...) mysteriously switches to bold text for no reason, many special characters are not displayed ("Legal unicode value encountered for a glyph we do not support. Replacing with '?' ")...
there is an external css file as long as my arm, and the problem must be somewhere in there, but i have not found it yet (still looking...), because NONE of the classes applied to the paragraphs in question mention "text-align : right", or specify margins. i added my own "text-align:left;" and defined 2% margins on the body : no joy. but if i remove the css file completely, the text reverts to correctly left-aligned with no margins.
last night, in desperation, i decided to give up on trying to make my imp correctly, and cheat by using the .doc file, in case this actually worked.
well, miraculously, it did, rather well, except for some "legal unicode characters" which are still replaced by "?" (like & # 601 ; which makes a small upside-down e as you can see
here, or look at the html capture in the "mysterious" phonetic spelling.)
Question 1 : is there some way (other than making images...) to get this stupid thing to display the proper glyphs ? (if not, maybe i will make images, but it's not a really good solution especially since i fear there will be dozens or even hundreds of them)
since this is a copyrighted book i suppose i cannot attach any of my files here, so i don't know whether anyone will be able to help me. i have made some screen captures of the hmtl and imp versions, just in case anyone might have an idea.
Question 2 : is this a problem which is known, like the UTF-8 problem ? is there an easy solution to it ??