[deback]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Don't convert to try to fix things. It will make the code more difficult to fix things. Go from the original code.

I have to disagree with this. Converting (with all of my settings) has saved me tons of time by not having to manually edit things that I used to edit.

Before you dive into the CSS, in the Calibre editor is an option to remove all extra CSS code. Use that to make the CSS easier to edit.

By the time I'm checking the book (after running modify and convert), all the unused CSS codes have been deleted by Convert. I used to also run Polish to delete the unused CSS codes, but then I discovered that Convert automatically deleted them, so I quit using Polish.

I too change the indents to 1.2em. I remove the line heights as your Kobo has a setting for line height and you can set it for what you want. It's better that way. Margins should be set to 0. Again Kobo has a setting for margins and you can only increase, not decrease the margins. So again, leaving the margins at 0 lets you choose what you want. There's no need to embed Charis SIL (or the even better ChareInk version that I made). You can side load the fonts you want and use the Kobo firmware setting to select which font you want. As for justification, remove all text-align: left and justify. There again is a setting in the firmware for justification. Also, in classes that affect the body styling, remove any font-size 1em or less. Also, any you get any sort of space of 5% or more, I change that to less. What that is depends on where the space is. For ToC headers, I use a top/bottom margin of 0.8em. But you may find something like 1 or 1.5em to be more to your liking. If there are any widows and orphans in the CSS, I remove those and put a widows: 1 and orphans: 1 in the body style (if there is not a body style, add one).

I don't use Kobo. I read ebooks using ADE 2 on my laptop, which works the best for me for many reasons. I had to quit using two different Nooks because of the hassle involved, and with a laptop, I can switch between ADE and a browser or whatever. So, all the things you mentioned in the above paragraph are done automatically by Modify and Convert.

The ToC I check to see if there is a Cover as the first entry so when you first view the ePub, you go right to the cover. Without Cover as the first entry, you do not see the cover and you start at whatever the first entry is. I don't go changing the names in the ToC as they are fine as is.

I used to add an entry for the Cover in every file I did, but then I decided to quit doing that, because (1) it really wasn't important to me, and (2) it was too time-consuming when modifying/converting/editing hundreds of books.

You can install the epubcheck plugin for Calibre and that allows you to use epubcheck to validate your ePub. I've never had a problem with ePub that are validated with epubcheck. I also sometimes use the Calibre validator. If both say there are no errors, there are no structural errors.

The Check Book feature in the editor is good enough for me. Again, it would be too time-consuming to add more things to my system. I've never heard of Calibre validator, so I might try to find more info about that.

Another thing I do is remove the internal ToC (the HTML ToC) and I remove things like "About the Publisher" a list of the author's other books, any reviews, advertisements, previews for other books, newsletter links, piracy notices, and any other rubbish I don't need. You just delete those files in the text section. The NCX ToC will automatically be edited to remove those files if they are there. Also, if there are any embedded fonts I don't want, I delete them and remove the code from the CSS. If you do have any embedded fonts you do keep, in the Tools menu is where you can find the option to subset the embedded fonts to make them smaller and remove any that are not used.

This would be way too time-consuming to add to my system, due to the volume of books I work with. Removing rubbish pages in each book is not important to me (sometimes, I do remove certain pages, but not too often). I'm mainly concerned with making sure the paragraph text is justified and has side margins of 30pt and that the text is a nice font, like Charis. Also, my settings do remove all fonts and font codes automatically, and the Charis font that is embedded is automatically subset. It really depends on the book I'm working with. If I'm editing and reformatting an OpenLibrary file, then I don't include any junk pages, and I make sure that everything is perfect.

But remember, DO NOT CONVERT!

Again, I DISAGREE! I've had no problems with converting, and doing that has saved me hundreds of hours that I used to spend doing manual editing. Before I started using my current system, I would open each file in the editor and hit the buttons for beautify, smarten punctuation, remove unused CSS, ToC, and then check book. With my current system, I just hit check book, and once in a while, I'll have to manually edit something (usually the code for the cover image or a typo in one of the CSS codes), so the amount of time I spend now is much less than it used to be due to all the settings, extra CSS, and transform rules I've added to the conversion process.