Quote:
Originally Posted by Tomifonication
Thanks for the recommendation, but admittedly it's not really relevant to what I'm trying to do. Obtaining the files isn't a problem (currently download Kindle for Mac 1.17), it's removing the line/paragraph breaks and ensuring I don't lose much by converting from AZW3 to AZW3.
Talking with Sirtel et al., the best way to do it is manually editing the offending books' CSS, and looking for commonalities. Working well thus far, and I'm learning CSS, so it's all good!
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Folks, it's NOT widows and orphans. It's how the publisher set the spacing, between paragraphs, which does NOT equal one line of space! This is NOT PRINT, and squared pages---which, by the way, are only done today by trade publishing houses, because despite what people believe, it's not done through kerning and leading, but, rather, by requiring the author/editor to add X characters or remove them--but digital. That means that the spacing between paragraphs can vary--so that, between regular body paragraphs, perhaps it's a half-space (half line-height). Between scenes, it can be almost anything.
What this means is simply this--if your page has 3 paragraphs, with two half-spaces between them, the LAST LINE is going to be in a different spot, ever-so-slightly--than if you have 4 paragraphs with 3 half-spaces between them. It's not rocket surgery, and the ONLY way to eliminate it would be to change the amount of space, the top- or bottom-margin, between paragraphs. Even THEN, it might not be exact, for a zillion different reasons. If the publisher used a different font, with a different ascender height, in the middle of a line, it will affect the line-heights, and that will affect the page, and the "squaring" of it.
Do the math. If a line is 1.2ems high, and the space BETWEEN them is not 1.2ems high, but something else--think about it.
It's NEVER going to be squared, not ever. Not unless every single screen has the same number of lines, and the same number of paragraphs.
With all due respect, without redoing the entire book, changing it to a monospace font, changing the line-heights to 1.0, rather than 1.2 ems (which you probably cannot do and override the Amazon settings), you'll never "fix" it. That's because
it's not broken.
If this actually bothers you, I'd also
strongly recommend that you don't read ANY self-pubbed print books, either, because they don't bother to square the pages--they think that widows and orphans matter more, so they choose that over page squaring. Most self-pubs won't sit there and edit a given page, to eliminate 24 characters, so that they can square the page. Believe me, we've done over 4,000 eBooks nad hundreds of print, and you know how many times a self-pub went through the effort to square a page, by doing what Random House does? ONCE. And for that matter, most trade pubs aren't bothering to do it any longer, either.
It's not broken. There's no easy or magical or Calibre fix. You'd have to change the
entire rendering system so that the line-heights
are all the same, and the space
between paragraphs = a single line height, for it to square--and then, yes, the widow and orphans settings will also cause this. OR, the space between paragraphs--even scene-breaks--will have to be the same as the space between lines inside a paragraph. That's the only way. No fleurons, no asterisms, no this, no that. It would look like your basic 1960's term paper, typed on a manual typewriter, rather than a modern book. THEN, you'd have squared pages.
I mean, can we all remember, for a moment,
that ebooks reflow? The pages are NOT set? It's not fixed-layout?
This is how they are intended to work.
Hitch