Random spacing when I convert files in Calibre.

[MuseRising]

One of my favourite authors, Matthew Reilly, has quite a few short stories in digital format as free-for-all on his website. When I download these and open them in Word (the default program that they decide to open in), they're displayed correctly.

When I send them packing to Calibre and convert to .mobi so that they can be read on my Kindle, however, all sorts of strange spacing issues start to occur. Words will join together andcreateabigrunonwordlikethis, and paragraphs

will space themselves strangely, much like this. There doesn't seem to be anything in the actual text that triggers it. I had thought, because he uses dashes and italics pretty extensively for effect, that these were causing issues. When I read the file in Word, though, I don't notice anything particular about where it starts to whack out once it's converted to .mobi.

Is there something that I'm doing wrong? Some vital step in the conversion process that I'm overlooking? My past experience with Calibre has only been to back up my ebooks - I'm very new to converting them to different formats, but it seemed intuitive enough. Until this happened!

His downloads are here if anybody feels inspired to have a nose around!

in advance!

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by MuseRising

His downloads are here if anybody feels inspired to have a nose around!

All downloads I see there are PDFs, so they sure shouldn't open in Word, and they don't here.

But it fits the symptoms you see. PDFs are the Format From Hell as an input format for conversions. See this sticky: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118605

You are pretty much out of luck, unless you're up for a lot of manual cleaning-up.

[MuseRising]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

All downloads I see there are PDFs, so they sure shouldn't open in Word, and they don't here.

But it fits the symptoms you see. PDFs are the Format From Hell as an input format for conversions. See this sticky: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118605

You are pretty much out of luck, unless you're up for a lot of manual cleaning-up.

That's ... strange. I have no idea why my computer is opening them in word. One of them actually automatically saved to my computer with 'WORD DOC' in front of the title of the story in the file name itself...

In any case, thank you for directing me to that sticky! I would have gone there initially, but I didn't realise that they're PDF downloads. They really do come up in my computer as word docs... Unless the format has been changed between now and when I downloaded them.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by MuseRising

In any case, thank you for directing me to that sticky! I would have gone there initially, but I didn't realise that they're PDF downloads. They really do come up in my computer as word docs... Unless the format has been changed between now and when I downloaded them.

They may have been DOCs or RTFs initially (those standard open in Word), but they are PDFs now; you can see it when you hover over the download links.

Calibre knows how to handle RTF, so if you could import and convert them, that's probably what yours are. But RTF mostly converts pretty well, so then your issues are strange. They sure sound like PDF conversion issues.