Thank you, I was finally able to tweak ebook-convert flags and generate the debug output!
Actually, all my CSS rules are properly applied and merged with Calibre's, as inspecting processed/stylesheet.css revealed. The structure of the HTML file at this stage in the process is:
Code:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Table of Contents | Willkommen, bienvenue, benvenuto, bienvendia, bem-vindo, ahlan wa sahlan, добро пожаловать, 환영, 欢迎,welcome!</title>
<meta content="" name="description"/>
<meta content="GitBook 2.6.5" name="generator"/>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>
<link href="stylesheet.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
<link href="page_styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/>
</head>
<body class="dir">
<div class="page">
<div class="section">
<h1 class="calibre">Table of Contents</h1>
<ol class="calibre1">
<li class="calibre2">
<span class="inner">
<a href="index.html" class="calibre3 pcalibre1 pcalibre2 pcalibre">Introduction</a>
<span class="page1">0</span>
</span>
</li>
<li class="calibre2">
<span class="inner">
<a href="quick-start.html" class="calibre3 pcalibre1 pcalibre2 pcalibre">Quick-start</a>
<span class="page1">1</span>
</span>
</li>
</ol>
</div>
</div>
</body></html>
So, actually, what seems to happen is that when applying a CSS styling to "body" or ".dir" (both cases), the
Output Plugin only considers what's inside the body tag, so it doesn't apply the rules.
Back to square one, then: is it possible to instruct Calibre/ebook-converter to apply a background that would extend the whole page? The only option I can think of is to apply that background to ".page", reduce its margins to 0 somehow while adding some padding. Not the best idea ever I'm afraid, though.