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[Dragen]

Hello.

I'm doing a project, where I intend to make a whole series look the same because, sadly, the publisher decided it would look good to have different styles in various entries of the series.

But I've hit a snag. In most of the books, the first letter of the chapter is stylized.
Example:

<p class="flushleft"><span class="gray">T</span>he castle stood on rising ground half a kilometre from the river.</p>

Which is what I want.

But in some books, the publisher decided it would stylize a few words instead.
Example:

<p class="flushleft"><span class="gray">The castle stood</span> on rising ground half a kilometre from the river.</p>

And the perfectionist in me can't have that.

Is there a way to automate moving </span> in the first p-line in each chapter to after the first letter (and also ignoring symbols like ')?

[philja]

You could try a regex find and replace. For me, this seems to work and copes with stuff like I'm.

Find: <span class="gray">([A-Z]{1})(.+)</span>
Replace: <span class="gray">\1</span>\2

Try it out cautiously.

[Turtle91]

***DOH! Ninja'd again!***

Use a find/replace. Something like this:

Find:
<p class="flushleft"><span class="gray">(.)(.*?)</span>

Replace:
<p class="flushleft"><span class="gray">\1</span>\2


Although that doesn't separate out lines that begin with quotes. For that you could do something like:

Find:
<p class="flushleft"><span class="gray">(\p{P}*?)(.)(.*?)</span>

Replace:
<p class="flushleft">\1<span class="gray">\2</span>\3

[DNSB]

@Turtle91: Ninja'd. I should have been a bit faster. I went to quote your message and the information on quotes or other punctuation I was going to add was suddenly present.

[Turtle91]

Yeah...I realised I didn't answer the part about punctuation in the original, so I edited it to add that part...also realized philja beat me to the answer!

[Turtle91]

Personally, I don't like using the <span> technique for first letters...it can cause issues with searching, etc. because it breaks up the word. I use css to handle all the styling. If the user's device/app recognizes the css, then it looks great. If it doesn't support the css then they get a slightly reduced quality look...

CSS:
/* First Para in Chapter in lieu of Drop Caps */
p.first               {text-indent:0; font-size:1em; clear:both}
p.first::first-letter {font-family:serif; font-size:2em; font-weight:bold;
                       float:left; margin:-.1em .1em}
p.first::first-line   {font-variant:small-caps; font-size:1.15em}

HTML:
<p class="first">Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>

[Dragen]

Thank you all for the advice.

I ended up going with @Turtle91's CSS route.

But I have copied the regex options, for later experimentation.

[ElMiko]

@Turtle91 - presumably, though, the pseudo elements will fail on some number of epub 2 systems, whereas the spans will not, right?

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by ElMiko

@Turtle91 - presumably, though, the pseudo elements will fail on some number of epub 2 systems, whereas the spans will not, right?

Possibly, but then it will look like a normal sentence. Both of those Pseudo elements have been around forever... like CSS 2 or something... so the chances of it not being honored are low, and only for really ancient devices.

The other option is having the spans break up the word/sentence on all devices. Pick your poison.