Quote:
Originally Posted by ToutSuite
Following the advice to save debug files, I opened the .htm file in the Input directory with Dreamweaver and saw that while the text appeared correctly, the entire body of the text was encapsulated in a single <pre> tag. I assume this can't possibly be right.
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It ain't, your source was coded by a monkey.
The only way to fix this is to search through the text and try to find what sort of marker was being used to indicate paragraphs instead of marking the text properly. This depends on the species of monkey who prepared the original. Old-World monkeys may do this by inserting a number of spaces at the start of a new paragraph to simulate a text indent (the use of a <pre> tag suggests this might be what you're dealing with). New-World monkeys may use <br> tags to indicate paragraphs.
Once you've discovered what sort of ridiculous scheme they used, you'll need to search for these elements and replace them with </p><p> pairs in order to reconstruct a proper markup (obviously you'll need to check the start and end of text blocks as well and add the proper opening or closing tags).
Luckily, publishers have generally phased out the use of monkeys to encode their ebooks, but many still try to save money by employing chimpanzees and gorillas. A few are grudgingly starting to employ actual human beings to do this.