[gmw]

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I set the Default (Normal in MSO) style to whatever I type the book in (as noted previously I have paragraph spacing while I'm working and for print review, but remove it when I export to epub).

So I start out by going to Format-->Paragraph-->Spacing and I put say 10 pts before and after the paragraph. Cool. Then I get a "normal & Space before 10pt, after 10pt." style in my styles and formatting window. So I do my work and save it for the day. Then a month later when I'm done with the entire novel I 'select all' and return the paragraph spacing to 0 pt before and 0 pt after. and then the "normal& Space..." style disappears and I have single spacing, right? (And somehow the html knows where the paragraphs are.)

Using Format->Paragraph->Spacing is creating a new style (for the current/selected paragraphs), you don't want to do that. You can modify the Normal style directly in your styles and formatting window (in OO/LO you do this by right click on the item in the styles and formatting window and choose Modify). Similarly configure styles for your chapter headings and so on. You may choose to rename the styles to for neatness and clarity.

You should NOT do a select all when altering a style. The style is already applied to all relevant paragraphs, you just modify the style to what you want and all paragraphs using that style will change automatically. (Which is the point of using styles in the first place.)

I use a plug-in for OpenOffice/LibreOffice that produces my epub with all the styles transferred to CSS and so on - including any current paragraph spacing. I can't speak for how things are done in MS-Office (though I have heard that direct export to HTML can be messy).

The sorts of things I check for in my epub CSS file is where the export may have transferred some measurements as px (pixels) or explicit (cm/inch) sizes, rather than % or em (font size). Not generally much a problem now, but I check anyway.

Originally Posted by Gregg Bell

I have seen some epub creations that set the default style for p and remove the class="...",

This is exactly what I have done.

So what you're saying is I have my html with <p class="Style 1">...</p> or whatever and I adjust my css in the html to adapt to that being there?

Yep. You can, if you want, leave your spacing in your source file alone and just edit the CSS in the output to get the spacing you want. As noted above, giving your styles neat meaningful names in the source document can help when it comes time to edit the CSS.