Quote:
Originally Posted by armchair
Thanks, so epub it is then. I dimly grasp but didn't really understand your comments about editing out hard carriage returns etc - sounds a bit techie for my level.. I just want to read stuff, not grapple with technical editing issues if I can avoid it. If I've got dozens of ebooks with messy-looking formatting (which I have), it would probably be a big project to tidy them up. But let me be more specific: using Calibre for converting file formats, if you go to the Set Conversion Defaults tab /"Look and Feel" - there are options to tick eg Remove spacing between paras, no text justification, etc - which settings do I want?? And in "Chapter Detection" - do I want to "Force use of auto-generated Table of Contents"?? Yeesh..
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hm, well, editing out the hard carriage returns can be time-consuming but it is possible. take a look at
this thread to start, i think it sounds like the same problem as you have.
as for the calibre questions, first a little tip, if you hover over the options a short explanation will be displayed at the bottom of the dialogue box. and if you get stuck, you might take a look in the calibre forum to see whether you find an answer there, if not you can start a new thread. kovid is very active here and there are a lot of people who know very well how everything works.
some of the options depend on your personal taste :
"remove spacing between paras" : if ticked, it will remove the empty line between paragraphs.
"no text justification" justifed text means text which has a "straight" margin on both sides. it forces each line to be the same length. personally i dislike automatic justification because (particularly with a larger font size) it will result in irregular spaces and sometimes "rivers" where there will be a large space in about the same place on several lines down the page, which i find really ugly. but a lot of people strongly prefer justified text. note that currently, the epub rendering motor used on the sonys cannot handle justification, so even if you specify that the text will be displayed left-aligned. but since adobe has already added this function presumably sony can add it through a firmware update, and other models probably will have it as well.
as for the "force use of the auto-generated toc", it will create a new table of contents based on the chapters it detects. if there already is a table of contents you may not need to tick this. i don't know much about that option, so at worst you could ask in the calibre forum.
it can be a lot of work to format all your books, i recommend you do them little by little so you don't feel ovewhelmed ! particularly if they all need specific attention. but it is a great feeling to read a really nicely displayed ebook !
