View Single Post
Old 10-17-2025, 03:50 PM   #1
franklekens
Evangelist
franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.franklekens ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
franklekens's Avatar
 
Posts: 407
Karma: 3421956
Join Date: Sep 2009
Device: various Kobo's, Onyx Note2, Pocketbook 360, Kindle Keyboard
superfluous blank lines between paragraphs

Warning, this is a real beginner's question. I kind of know how html/xml works, *and* how CSS works, on a basic level. But not very systematically.

Now I have a number of ebooks from professional publishers where the text is formatted weirdly: paragraphs don't have the first line indented, but instead there's a blank line between every paragraph.
I'd like to remedy this for myself by editing the epubs concerned in Sigil or some other software (hoping of course that it will be a simple matter of changing one or two lines in the css, or doing a search and replace for some code in the other files).

However, when I look at the file in Sigil, I just can't find what is wrong with it. That is, I just can't see how the xml markup (*or* the css) differs from books that don't show this problem -- i.e. where there is no blank line between paragraphs, and their first line is indented.

What would be the obvious place to look?


Here's a sample of text from one of those books:


Quote:
<p id="_idParaDest-4" class="hoofdstuk" lang="nl-NL">Chapter title</p>
<p class="algemeen" lang="nl-NL">First paragraph This only contains text.</p>
<p class="algemeen" lang="nl-NL">And another paragraph like this.</p>
<p class="algemeen" lang="nl-NL">And another paragraph like this.</p>
And in the paragraph styles section of the css, all it says about the "algemeen" class (algemeen is Dutch for general) is this:

Quote:
.algemeen{
font-family:"romein";
font-size:1em;
}
.groot{
font-family:"romein";
font-size:2em;
}
.algemeen + .algemeen{
text-indent:15pt;
}
And all it says in the section before the <body> tag is this:

Quote:
<?xml version='1.0' encoding='utf-8'?>
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:epub="http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops" epubrefix="z3998: http://www.daisy.org/z3998/2012/vocab/structure/#" lang="en" xml:lang="en">
<head/>
I hope this code will be visible here.

Should I look somewhere else?
franklekens is offline   Reply With Quote