[porphyry5]

I mostly use calibre in semi-automatic scripts to convert pdfs and ocr-ed texts to epub format, and have found more or less by accident, when producing .txt input to calibre, that it reacts to various cues in the text. For example:
Lines beginning with the word 'Chapter' and not ending in a period will appear in the epub as bolded chapter headings on a fresh page and with an entry in the inline TOC, but if it ends with a period it is treated as an ordinary text paragraph;
If a line is bounded with underscores, it appears in the epub in italic text.

I have not been able to find any documentation specific to how ebook-convert reacts to such text patterns, but was wondering if there are others, such as might produce bolded text in the epub, or indent an entire block of text.

I realize that such effects, and many more, can be obtained by converting the txt to html, but the txt process is so much more automatic that I far prefer to use it if possible.