Problem with spaces between characters

[Bens1912]

Hello,
I have some e-books that have issues with spaces between characters. This makes the text almost unreadable.

This gives this result:


Do you know if I can fix this with Calibre?
Thanks for your help. I'm a beginner with e-readers.

[theducks]

We need to ALSO SEE the code view for that same text.
It seems very inconsistent, which why I am moving (a style) letter-spacing down the list.
A suspect this was a PDF at some time. Good luck (see the MR sticky under Conversions)

[Bens1912]

Yes, there are spaces in the HTML code. Is there a way to fix this, or do I have to manually edit all the lines? I have 74 books, so I'll give up...

[PeterT]

Complain to the reseller that the books you purchased are unreadable and demand a refund

[JSWolf]

This looks like a very bad conversion from PDF.

[Jaws]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

This looks like a very bad conversion from PDF.

One other possible source is a software layer prior to PDF. Some typesetting programs played games with TrueType (.ttf, not .otf) letterspacing to simulate or otherwise account for nonbreaking letter-pairs (ff in a language other than the hyphenation dictionary), so the error entered the file in conversion to PDF in the first place, and persists during later conversion from the PDF.

It's not always the PDF itself — sometimes it's cheap fonts used in the program that generated the PDF, especially since one font foundry of about a quarter of a century ago had a "license agreement" that was ridiculously excessive and restrictive at the same time, leading even some well-known publishers to seek (cheap!) substitutes. Or, sometimes, using a .ttf font that had special characters not included in the standard commercial offerings (such as extensive quotations in Cyrllic in the middle of a Roman-character book). Even a better conversion from PDF can't overcome this problem.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Jaws

One other possible source is a software layer prior to PDF. Some typesetting programs played games with TrueType (.ttf, not .otf) letterspacing to simulate or otherwise account for nonbreaking letter-pairs (ff in a language other than the hyphenation dictionary), so the error entered the file in conversion to PDF in the first place, and persists during later conversion from the PDF.

It's not always the PDF itself — sometimes it's cheap fonts used in the program that generated the PDF, especially since one font foundry of about a quarter of a century ago had a "license agreement" that was ridiculously excessive and restrictive at the same time, leading even some well-known publishers to seek (cheap!) substitutes. Or, sometimes, using a .ttf font that had special characters not included in the standard commercial offerings (such as extensive quotations in Cyrllic in the middle of a Roman-character book). Even a better conversion from PDF can't overcome this problem.

It's very easy to remove embedded fonts if there are any. However, this does not look like an embedded font issue. It looks like a very poor conversion.