Converting to epub from rtf vs. docx

[kjulia28]

Hi all! I only recently got into organising a huge backlog (600+) of short stories in Calibre. The bulk of these was in 6.0 .doc files, a few newer ones are in .docx. I converted all the .doc files into .rtf files for Calibre compatibility (that I didn't think of just making everything .docx was... a brain error) and figured out how I had to format the text in the .rtf file for Calibre to do what I wanted it to do on epub conversion.

All my files look like this on the first page, no cover page in the file:

Title
Author


text text text text text text text text text text text text
text text text text text text text text text text text text


When there were hard breaks after title and/or author, Calibre by default used to give me a page break, which I didn't want. I then went through all my files replacing the hard paragraph breaks with soft breaks, and that works fine now. For everything else (paragraph spacing in the epub etc) the Calibre defaults worked well, without me having to do anything in the file.

But now I've noticed that some (though not all) epubs based on the .docx files I didn't need to convert now have no spacing between paragraphs. (The text in these docx files seems formatted the same -- hard breaks after paragraphs, but no space after paragraphs -- as in the rtfs and other docx files where this works *fine*. They were also bulk-converted (i.e. with the same settings) with other docx files or the rtf files which do end up with paragraph spacing.

I know I can solve this for the individual epub by re-converting with a 'insert blank line' setting. But it makes bulk conversion a bit of a pain in the butt when you only (seem to) see afterwards which epubs worked without the extra line and which need it.

So I'm wondering if this is due to formatting in the .docx that I'm unaware of, but I'm not really sure where to look or what to pay attention to. Anyone have experience with converting from rtf vs. docx and formatting pitfalls?

To summarize:

What I want to avoid in the epub:
-- page break after the title/author lines
-- indent

What I would like in the epub:
-- space between paragraphs

My problem:
-- I have figured out how an .rtf must be formatted to do both of the above, but converting .docx seems to produce uneven results, and I don't know why.

I would greatly prefer not having to turn the docx files into rtf too just because I can't figure out how to work conversion from docx.

Any hints much appreciated!