Quote:
Originally Posted by laurla
Library Addict - I've been thinking about doing this for the new year...My biggest concern is understanding css/stylesheets (not even sure I'm using the right terminology). I know I can manually tweak away at the books to my hearts content but I'm thinking there is a better way. Ideas for a partial tech dummy? I'd appreciate any tips you might have  |
I'm doing each book individually. Some require next to no work and others are a total mess.
I explode the ePub, remove unwanted front and back matter (excerpts, praise, TOC as a page, etc). Mostly I leave in the list of the author's other books, but if it's both the front and back of the book, I remove one. Stuff like that.
I usually only edit the stylesheet if needed to correct spacing I can't do with the actual conversion process. (I like my paragraphs single spaced with no gaps between them). I haven't been changing the level of indent unless it's way too little or too much (I had one book where the first line of each paragraph was like 80% indented
). Some books need a lot of work if the formatting wasn't well done to begin with. Sometimes I edit the individual chapters using SeaMonkey (free HTML editor). But those books are more the exception than the norm.
If it's a more simply formatted book (or conversely one with really messy css) I just check the box on the Look & Feel page in Calibre conversion to remove spacing between paragraphs. Usually I leave the indent size as no changes, but will use 1.5em if needed. If needed, I can add in more space in section breaks on the Search & Replace screen at the same time.
I also use Search & Replace quite a bit to make corrections to the text or add a bit more space to signify section breaks. I also take out *** or other symbols if it's only on a few section breaks. I get that publishers are just copying the print format (and use *** to indicate section break that appears at the end of a page). But I like either all of the section breaks to have *** or symbols or none of them.
Sometimes I have to add 2 <br/> to get the spacing to match sometimes 1 or 3, so I may have to convert the book multiple times until I am happy with the results.
The Table of Contents page and Structure Detection (especially the block where you can force page breaks) are well-used options, too. Particularly with older digital books or ones from mobi or LIT format.
I don't know how to do everything with regular expressions. So if I need a more "custom" result, that's when I edit the stylesheet directly. I do know a bit of HTML so that helps. But the really complex stuff is over my head.
The Polish TOC feature is my favorite because I can add, remove, and rename items with such ease.
So it's really just a mixture of techniques I've learned over the years.