[frabjous]

Originally Posted by Jellby

Yes, that's a consequence of how CSS works. To fully control the format of a (let's call it) "badly structured" book, one would need some knowledge of CSS rules and of the classes used in the document, etc. I don't see a way out of it, other than including a full-feature CSS parser/editor/creator, which, well, I'm absolutely not going to write

I know how CSS works in general; I just didn't know about the !important flag and how it worked until now.

But what I had in mind above is something that went through all the CSS of the source and just changed any "font-family: XXX" attributes to "font-family: inherit" (and stripped any obsolete <font face="XXX"> tags) or something like that. I recognize (as I admitted in an earlier post) that this might be dangerous, since there might be a good reason for it changing it in a particular portion (e.g., in a multilingual document). The idea is that this would be an optional feature of the script that one would have to enable "force font change" or something like that.

I don't think that would require a full CSS parser/editor. A couple regex search and replace should handle it, no? Actually, I think I could probably alter your script accordingly with a few sed lines.

This does not mean it's not possible to override anything (and everything) in the book, just that it may be not so straightforward and "drag-and-drop" as wished. In this particular case I guess you could include in your default.css:

.mypararagraph { font-family: inherit !important; }

That was just an example. I'm not going to guess what class names the CSS of the book uses. If I open the source CSS to look, I might as well just alter the source CSS directly.

Before adopting it, however, it would be desirable to discuss the name a bit. Maybe "pdf-style" is too broad, and something like "prince-style" would be better, since there might be other XHTML-to-PDF converters one could use.

prince-style is probably better, unless there's any indication that the Prince extensions are being picked up by other software, which I suppose is a possibility, since they're fairly straightforward and reasonable.