conversion from .rtf problems

[gondwild]

I have a document that has line breaks well before the end of each page. Consequently, in .rtf its readable but when converting to .epbub or .mobi the lines get jumbled so the line runs to the end of the screen, finishes with 4 or 5 words on the next line, and then begins a new line.

some sample text from the document:

"decades and began traveling in Europe, a continent he’d never
seen. In the past year he had visited France, Holland, and most
recently Italy. They were package tours, traveling in the company
of strangers, riding by bus through the countryside, each
meal and museum and hotel prearranged. He was gone for
two, three, sometimes four weeks at a time. When he was away
Ruma did not hear from him. Each time, she kept the printout
of his flight information behind a magnet on the door of the
refrigerator, and on the days he was scheduled to fly she
watched the news, to make sure there hadn’t been a plane crash"

The obvious way to remedy this is to simply remove the line break from the end of each line, but thats some seriously time consuming work. Is there a way for calibre to do this?

[kovidgoyal]

you could do it if it was a txt file, but not rtf. calibre has various option for txt input that do this sort of thing. You can try converting it to txt first, but that will remove any formatting.

[itimpi]

Originally Posted by gondwild

The obvious way to remedy this is to simply remove the line break from the end of each line, but thats some seriously time consuming work. Is there a way for calibre to do this?

The normal technique is to use a global edit to:
- replace every double line break with some unusual character (or character sequence) not used in the document. The assumption is that the double line feeds are almost certainly paragraph breaks.
- Replace every single line feed with space. This allows text flow to happen.
- replace the character you used in the first step with whatever you want to use for paragraph breaks.

[greenapple]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

you could do it if it was a txt file, but not rtf. calibre has various option for txt input that do this sort of thing. You can try converting it to txt first, but that will remove any formatting.

Hi Kovid,

I've often wondered how you could do that, even if the text was in .txt format. The conversion options for plain text are:

- Treat each line as a paragraph
- Assume print formatting
- Process using markdown
- Do not insert table of contents

I can't figure out which option would remove unneeded line breaks automatically from the text file?

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by greenapple

Hi Kovid,
- Treat each line as a paragraph
- Assume print formatting
- Process using markdown
- Do not insert table of contents

I can't figure out which option would remove unneeded line breaks automatically from the text file?

Probably the second one as long as new paragraphs start with an indent, e.g.

    This is the start of the first paragraph which wraps
to multiple lines.
    This is a second paragraph.

[greenapple]

Thanks, jackie.

I wish Calibre could an an option to be able to detect a blank line as a paragraph break.

[jackie_w]

Originally Posted by greenapple

I wish Calibre could an an option to be able to detect a blank line as a paragraph break.

I think this is Calibre's default, greenapple.

If your txt's paragraphs contain hard line-breaks but are separated by a blank line then I don't think you need to check either of the options "Treat each line as a paragraph" or "Assume print formatting".

i.e. when the txt looks like

This is the first paragraph which
is too long to fit on one line and
has hard line-breaks.

This is the second paragraph
which also needs to wrap.

Third paragraph.

Pick a book from Project Gutenberg and try it.

[greenapple]

Got it. Thanks, jackie!