Quote:
Originally Posted by ldolse
Hi, Welcome to mobileread. It's actually a bit difficult to determine from your description what potential solutions may be, as we really need you to tell us all the steps you went through to get from 'xyz' document (and we need to know what xyz was), to a usable ebook. Your conversion settings would help a lot.
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Okay. Let me see here....I hope I'm explaining this right. The steps I take are as follows: I save the book as a word doc. Then to the web format. Then opened Calibre and added the book via the Add Books button. Hit the Edit Metadata button and put in my name and cover and so forth and converted from the source file (which Calibre calls a zip for some reason--so from Zip to Mobi for the Kindle (or zip to epub for the Sony). Then I fix the Look and feel, looked at Heuretic processing. Haven't a clue what to do with it, so leave it alone. Go to page set up. Input and Output set to Kindle (or epub depending on the device). Structure Detection: all I changed there was to choose page break as the chapter mark and "Remove Fake Margins" is checked. Table of Contents all I change there is the number of the chapters. Search and Replace and Mobi Output/Epub Output sections I left alone on their default. Then I go back to the main screen and output the book to the Device.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ldolse
Anyway it looks like your book has some sort of css which is creating huge margins at the top of chapter headings. What you need to do is figure out what the embedded css is that's doing this and over-riding it.
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Right. I see, when I look at the html
35 lines of this between the end of chapter one and the beginning of chapter two: *I'm removing some of the brackets so you can see the code* !--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->*</span></span></b</p
p class="MsoNormal"><b class="calibre1"><span class="calibre2"><span class="calibre3"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]-->*</span></span></b></p>
p class="MsoNormal">
etc. Now I suppose that's it trying to replicate the carriage returns? But I doubt it's 35 lines worth. Why is it doing that? That's what I can't understand. I could manually go through and cut the offending extra lines of code no problem. It's just time consuming and I've noticed the size of the blocks of this code vary from chapter to chapter. Odd that, since the chapter openings are about the same, 1/3 down the page in Word. So I'd like to nix the problem in the original html source if I can before it gets onto the ereader in the first place.

I'm sorry if I'm making this a little more complicated than it needs to be.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ldolse
If this is indeed a book you're writing/formatting on your own,
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Yes. It is.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ldolse
your best bet might be to use Sigil (an ePub authoring tool also supported on Mobileread) as your primary formatting tool, and once you have the ePub looking the way you want then convert that to mobi using Calibre.
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Sigil, huh? Okay, I shall give that program a try.

Again, I truly appreciate your help. Thanks so very much!