Quote:
Originally Posted by stumped
for me - its that the CSS is then in a form that I am used to seeing, sorted & simplified. i know that the main book style will be called calibre and that the text body styles will be numbered and sorted.... the dropcaps style(s) [ which I usually remove] will be called dropcaps and not opening_charater_of_1st_line or some such nonsense
some books have what looks like a bloated, put in everything and the kitchen sink sort of css and for what I typically want to do : tweak line heights, line spacing, text margins, the calibre-ised one is easier to work with.
or at the opposite stream there may be bare <p> styles with no class. calibre will insert a class for me which I can then tweak
also calibre adds in my preferred extra css which saves me going it manually ; thats for justification, hyphenation, widows, orphans, and it standardises page margins
and it creates an original format fallback position, which I can restore from if I then proceed to mess up an edit. that gets removed only when I am fully satisfied so seeing both formats in the library signals to me that I have a tweak in progress or about to start. |
hmmm, interesting.
I can see what you are trying to do. May I make a few points that you (or others reading) may not be aware of?
- It is possible to save a standard CSS file which can be imported to any epub. Just right-click on an existing css sheet and select "save as". After adding the file to a new ePub, right-click on your html file and select "link stylesheets". This allows you to have your css exactly how you want it - and with named classes instead of numbered so you can intuitively figure out what styling is being applied. You can edit your html without referencing which "number" does what styling. <p class="sectionbrk"> vs <p class="calibre42">
- Once you are done editing you can select "tools/delete unused stylesheet classes" to remove any excess css styles - no bloat.
- It is not required, or even a good idea IMO, to put a class name next to a standard element eg. <p class="normalparagraph"> or <body class="calibre">. You can simply style the normal element using the base tag. That makes it so much easier to determine when there are abnormal styling applied to a specific element and leaves a normal paragraph (98% of the book) uncluttered.
For example:
- I completely understand having a fallback file. I always "save early, save often" using the "save-as" function. Using that method you can have multiple save points in your saved editing folder.
Of course, these are all techniques. Take 'em or leave 'em. I was just wondering if there was something that Calibre does to create a more compliant ePub that I wasn't aware of.
Cheers!