@BeckyEbook , , . Well, quite honestly, if you try to convert this to span tags:
Code:
<p><em>This</em><em> </em><em>is</em><em> </em><em>an</em><em> </em><em>italic</em><em> </em><em>sentence.</em></p>
. . . You will always get a mess because the
<em> </em> tags have been incorrectly applied i.e. the tags should
never straddle just a blank space. All this plugin feature does is convert all <i>, <b>, <em>, <u> etc code to its span equivalent code using inline styling and that's it. It's not meant to fix mistakes in code or bad code, but it is meant to make your epub code compliant to the epub standard.
A way out for you -- and you probably do this already anyway is my guess -- would be to remove all redundant and unnecessary
<em> </em> tags in one swoop using Sigil's search and replace thus:
Search for:"<em> </em>"
Replace with: " "(a space)