Thread: Kobo Bug thread
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Old 03-09-2017, 03:47 PM   #852
Rev. Bob
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Join Date: Feb 2013
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Device: Kobo H2O, iPad mini 3, Kindle Touch
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rev. Bob View Post
For instance, suppose we all agreed to define a standard body text paragraph as having zero margins all around, no changes to font size or line height, and a first-line indent of 1.5em... and then we defined that as class "std". A non-indented version would be the same, except for a zero value for first-line indent - and since that's usually used to start a section/chapter, that could be "first". These are CSS classes, and those two right there are sufficient to lay out the bulk of your average novel.
As a belated postscript, I just proved that about an hour ago. I saw a series in the Smashwords sale that was eight short stories (all available free) and one omnibus (not free). As far as I'm aware, the omnibus contains zero new content, so I just snagged the infividual stories and reconstructed the collection myself.

This actually proved much easier than I'd expected it would. Saving a sample of the omnibus got me the front matter and the first two stories. Once I cleaned those up, I used the stub of the third story (title and first paragraph) to make a template for the other six stories' files. The back matter was fairly standard, so I lifted that from the last story in the set (as the most recent). So, in relatively short order, I've got a pretty solid skeleton for the omnibus.

After that, it was just a matter of opening the omnibus and each story in separate calibre instances, deleting all the text files from each component ebook to leave just the story intact (not even the title!), and cleaning out the unused CSS classes. In most of the cases, all I was left with was one class for the body text, another for the midpoint line Smashwords likes to insert, and sometimes an italics class. A quick search let me remove tbe midpoints and deal with italics, then I just renamed the body text class to match the omnibus stylesheet. Copy, paste, save, repeat until done. I don't think the omnibus style sheet topped 50 lines.
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