Detecting and controlling for : * * * Narrative Jumps

[ThanosNaranja]

I often see '* * *' (no apostrophes) centered in a page to denote jumps or changes in the flow of narrative or a change in Point of View (character perspective). In the Calibre conversion process these '* * *' are handled by the converter and show up in the Calibre Reader displayed correctly centered in the page between paragraphs, but I have not yet found a full fledged Android Reader like FB, Coolbooks, or AlBook that will display the '* * *' correctly centered. Does anyone have any idea why this is? I realize I can address this issue to the various Reader developers, but wanted to ask here as well. For instance, is there some '* * *' detection code for the converter that would better handle them.

[JSWolf]

The problem is that most eBook readers for Android do not properly respect CSS code and this they are (IMHO) rubbish.

[jackie_w]

I think you have 3 potential choices:

1. Change your Android reading app to one that is better suited to automatically honouring the epub internal CSS styling, e.g. Bookari, PocketBook, UBReader, Aldiko to name but four. I'm sure there are many more.
   
2. If they exist, change the settings in your current Android reading app to obey existing internal CSS rather than overriding it with your device preferences. I think FBReader, CoolReader, Moon+ let you do this. Depending how well/badly formatted your original epubs are, this option may create more problems than it fixes.
   
3. Stay with your existing Android app which I'm assuming lets you ignore all epub internal styles and replaces them with your device preferences. But find a way to change all HTML markup containing '***' to one of the lesser-used heading tags,
   e.g. <h6>***</h6>
   You can then use your app's CSS overrides to centre all <h6> headings.
   
   To change the HTML markup you could use an epub editor (calibre or Sigil) on each individual book - time consuming. Or maybe you could look at calibre's Search/Replace option in its conversion settings to see if you could get what you need via a bulk epub-to-epub conversion.