Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyKate
I find the spans and "hard page breaks" totally irritating.
I usually do a total cleanup for favorite authors lol but seem to have quite a problem doing a conversion from pdf or whatever without touching on correcting them at least a little.
One disappointing thing is that HTML BOOK FIXER while it removes all the spans etc also removes the formatting of <span class="italic"> or bold or whatever lol. Sometimes I wonder how important those italics are versus an unreadable book.
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I only clean up formatting problems that will affect readability or annoy me more than mildly. That is the minimum standard of formatting quality for books allowed to remain in my library. That includes books by all authors, even favorite authors. I usually ignore other problems, which reduces clean up time considerably. Like I said, I'd rather read than fix formatting.
I fix hard page breaks if they affect readability, such as a page break after each ToC item, or a page break between "Chapter n" and an associated chapter title. I get rid of the offending page breaks in RTF or DOCX in Word by replacing "^m" with nothing, and let calibre insert page breaks automatically during conversion later. Is fixing page breaks more complicated in HTML/XHTML? They should be handled in CSS, yes?
I have PDFs only if I could find no better format, all nonfiction used infrequently for reference rather than reading start-to-finish. I prefer to be annoyed at their headers/footers than spend time eliminating them and other problems after conversion from PDF, so I don't bother to convert nonfiction PDFs. They are the only exception to my "no more than mildly annoying" rule. I have no fiction PDFs anymore. I gradually replaced them with better formats instead of converting and fixing them, except for a few I fixed that were unavailable in different format. At present PDFs are an infrequent annoyance.
I just checked statistics in my library. Less than 0.5% of the book formats are rated "mildly annoying", and 75% of those are advance reader copies with no specific annoying formatting, rated "mildly annoying" on general principle. "Mildly annoying" is the worst rating currently in the library, excluding placeholders with no format. Every other book format is rated "no annoyance". Less than 0.1% of the book formats are PDF; I rate them on relative annoyance of specific formatting problems, with a little slack due to unavailability of better formats, and ignore my strong annoyance at the mere existence of PDFs in my library. All other formats are EPUB.
What is mildly annoying to me may not annoy someone else. Or what doesn't annoy me may annoy someone else. Or any of various possible formatting quirks or problems may spark (in any of different people) anger, rage, or despair that drives a fix-formatting frenzy or, almost inconceivably, a retreat to paper books. But paper books may have formatting problems too, such as folded mis-cut corners or pages with blurred ink. An alternative is audio books, but what if the narrator conveys inappropriate emotion at inopportune moments, or inadvertently skips or misreads a few important words or sentences, or the volume level fluctuates between barely audible and loud?
Apparently there is no reprieve from either (1) suffering negative emotion in response to perceived/judged problems in formatting, or (2) fixing formatting to reduce the frequency and intensity of formatting-instigated negative emotion.