[Hitch]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

How terribly terribly unwieldy

If there are empty spans at end of sentences then they've probably come about via someone <snip for brevity>
I can't recall exact steps but you can get an EPUB where the second space is put in a span (from conversion I guess), then something (maybe something in Sigil) trashes the second space but leaves the empty span.

<snippage>

My solution is to use space|non-breaking-space. I don't give a stuff if that's sub-optimal, it works for me, I don't publish the stuff I edit, and I am not markup code fetishist

BR

Fear not, it wasn't you. :-) By that I mean, it wasn't the typical end-of-sentence spans from folks in Sigil hitting the space-bar twice. It has spans in the midst of words, as you typed them, essentially--a boatload of font-sizing instructions, which makes ME think that when my client said, "InDesign," what he really meant ("what the captain meant to say was...") a PDF that HAD been created with INDD, by some third party, that some other person put into something like AbbyyFineReader, or worse, some online "Magic convert your PDF to Word!" converter, and this abortion was the result. That's my $.05, at the moment.

Originally Posted by Toxaris

Well, I am not entirely sure, but if you mess a lot with styling in Word, this can happen. If you select a word and change it and then change it back (not via undo), I believe this will put a span around the selection it as it is styling applied to that specific selection. It is not checked if the styling is exactly the same as the parent. So, if they done this a lot (perhaps via S&R), disaster will strike... If it is a Word document originally and you get your hands on it, I would be interested to know what comes out of it after conversion to HTML and ePUB via my tools. In theory it should remove all that crud.

Depending on the styling in the ePUB, you could try importing the ePUB and re-export to ePUB via the tools. As stylenames would be retained, replacing the stylesheet afterwards should give you a head start.

Tox:

I hadn't used your Tools on this--I'll run it, and let you know what happens. Of course, if it cleans it stem-stern, then I'll hear no END of it from Barb. LOL. It's a no-win on this one, I definitely screwed the pooch. (What's weird is, I don't recall seeing anything that caught my attention with the analysis macro. Usually, something alerts me, or I see broken paras--something, somewhere, tells me it's a mess. I really have to go back and recreate what happened, because honestly, me not catching it is extremely unusual. A few thousand books in, you start seeing this stuff behind your eyelids--hell, you can't NOT see it. That's what's odd.)

Thanks, guys.

Hitch