Removing Soft Scene Breaks

[Waylander]

I tried to remove soft scene breaks in an azw3 from Ballantine Books using the heuristic processing tools, trying to replace the soft scene break with a hard scene break of three asterisk stars. This didn't work and I ended up losing the scene breaks completely.

The book has those really annoying small gaps between paragraphs, and the scene breaks are also really small. I usually either do what I tried above or remove margins and the remove paragraph spacing in the appearance section.

What else can I try? Bear in mind I'm a complete novice with css beyond the very basics so you'll have to lay it out step by step.

[Waylander]

Anyone got any ideas? I'd really appreciate some help, because then I can go on to do more complex (for me) conversions for myself.

[GeoffR]

There is actually no simple way to change scene breaks that is guaranteed to work for all books, because some publishers who use a space to mark scene breaks might also use the exact same style for spaces that are not scene breaks, and there is no certain way to know which are supposed to be scene breaks and which are suppposed to be something else without reading the book.

But assuming the publisher has used a unique style for scene breaks, say something like:

<p>... last line of previous scene.</p>
<p class="newscene">First line of next scene ...</p>

where p.newscene is something like:

p.newscene {
  margin-top: 1.5em;
  text-indent: 0;
}

Then you can search the html for:

</p>
<p class="newscene">

and replace it with something like:

</p>
<h6 class="myscenebreak">* * *</h6>
<p class="mynewscene">

and add h6.myscenebreak and p.mynewscene to the stylesheet:

h6.myscenebreak {
  font-size: 1em;
  font-weight: normal;
  margin-top: 1em;
  margin-bottom: 1em;
  text-align: center;
}
p.mynewscene {
  text-indent: 0;
}

However there are a million different ways the publisher can do the scenebreaks, the above is just one example, so you need to treat every book as a special case.

[Sirtel]

If you want help with this specific book, you can send me a sample via PM (scene break included) and I'll look at it. That is, if sending a sample of a copyrighted work is permitted here.
But as the previous poster said, the next book is probably formatted in a different way and must be fixed using a different method.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Sirtel

If you want help with this specific book, you can send me a sample via PM (scene break included) and I'll look at it. That is, if sending a sample of a copyrighted work is permitted here.
But as the previous poster said, the next book is probably formatted in a different way and must be fixed using a different method.

I don't think there is a problem with 2 or 3 Paragraphs (maximum) worth of code and the matching CSS sections