[momtodogs]

Thanks for your confidence in me, slantybard, however misplaced it may be.

I figured it would have something to do with 'coding' or 'encoding'; however, I haven't a clue as to what that is. I went into Preferences, and then ran screaming to Help, and then played Solitaire for an hour to calm myself, while chanting "I really am not a stupid person" over and over.

I found a reference to using BookDesign to successfuly fix this problem; however, the only download I could find was from 2007, and there were mentions of problems with it not working with Vista (and I have Vista 64-bit.) https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=30645

Before posting my original question, I actually did go through the document and do a 'find and replace' to fix the document (tedious thing, that, as I found myself reading and forgetting to correct.) As soon as I imported the .pdf to Calibre, it was all wrong again. So I imported it as an .rtf, which worked fine, but the document was 5MB in size; and when I converted it to .lrf and later, .epub, the same problem occurred again.

This has also happened with two subsequent books, so I'm pretty sure I have inadvertently changed something, in Preferences, that I should not have (though I didn't touch the boxes that had strings of 'swearing' symbols in them.) At this point, I am about to uninstall Calibre, and start over, unless someone has a better idea in the next 24 hours.

Keep in mind, while completely sold on the idea of ebooks, and cleaning out my shelves; I had never heard of DRM (different issue, I know) before, still don't know what it is (except that it is apparently bad), and how to 'strip' it. So coding is pretty much Greek to me. I was in my 30's before I touched a PC, so didn't cut my baby teeth on programming in school.