Successfully converting to epub for a generic reader

[Hoods7070]

For some reason that I couldn't solve on my own after hour upon hour and several more hours of trying a variety of things using Calibre, my generic reader still flatly refused to recognise any of its coding/CSS whatsoever. I did ask questions in the forum, but unfortunately none of the kindly given answers were helpful for my particular case since it seems no one else has the same somewhat obscure problem. My eReader happily displays Project Gutenberg and other free epub books - it just hates Calibre. I got fed up trying to figure it out and, FWIW, I have come up with my own Heath Robinson solution. I'm posting it here on the offchance that someone else out there might find it helpful. To whit:

1. Convert (nonDRM Amazon books, in my case) to ePub using Calibre - 15 seconds
2. Merge all the chapters in Sigil, then copy to clipboard - about 45 seconds. (Using Sigil for this step is necessary AFIK because PPX6 does not open epubs, mobis etc.)
3. Paste as plain text into a blank default Serif PagePlus X6 document. This does of course strip away Chapter headings, but replacing those only takes a few minutes with Find then clicking on the conveniently located styles options. In my case I set the parameters I wanted for the default Heading style. (If your book has the word Chapter in the chapter headings, not just numbers, all this is of course far quicker.)
4. Modify the paragraph spacing and indentation etc. to taste, as per Word, - a doddle. Further editing takes as long as you want it to take - I spend a while changing the US English to British English.
5. After that it's a matter of clicking Publish to epub and viola! (Yes, I am aware.)

There are probably shortcuts to this process, which I will probably discover in time, but I only got PPX6 yesterday and haven't ventured into its innards as yet. Their documentation is not the best, being somewhat illogically organized, with what I would think of as clearly related information being scattered about - but it wasn't too hard to find out how to do what I wanted to do using Search in the Help. You choose what action you want styles to take on the "Publish to epub" dialog and that's it. Your chapters are split perfectly at Headings (if you choose that option) and a perfect TOC is automatically generated.

I hope this is of some use to someone else out there.

[theducks]

@hoods
Calibre can convert to TXT (or a number of other common text formats)

[Hoods7070]

Calibre can convert to TXT (or a number of other common text formats)

Yes, you're quite right of course - I found that after posting. No need for Sigil at all.

My silly ereader still won't see any CSS styles (at all) but it does recognize paragraph indents created with Word-style (ruler-generated) paragraph indents. As long as I have an indent of SOME description I'm happy enough, but I'd love to know WHY it doesn't see styles, which are intrinsic to epubs. Of course less than zero support from the manufacturer re firmware.