Having trouble adding indents before paragraphs

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ianc

DNSB - I was thinking about how I could use the find\replace feature to change that, but that sounds like a more elegant solution than the one I had thought of. I'll give it a whirl. Thanks!

BetterRed, a book I really wanted to read was only available in a wretched image scan PDF. I tried to convert that directly in Calibre but no workie. My workaround was to manually delete the covers in Acrobat, then run it through k2pdfopt.exe with OCR turned on, then open that file in word, save it, and convert that in Calibre. Not sure how to format the Word file using the styles feature, but I'm new at this.... :-)

If you have a recent edition of MS Word try opening the PDF in it… it's OCRing is sometimes surprisingly good.

This addin for Word ==>> MR: Toxaris' eBook Tools has features to help cleanup OCR artefacts.

BR

[ianc]

Thanks guys, using the find and replace I was able to get the conversion to add the indents and I think it's looking quite good now. I appreciate your help and all your suggestions to make this onerous task easier in future.

Thanks again for the help!

[theducks]

<p></p> is probably someone writing books like they were on a Typewriter

But as indicated ALL <p> will be treated the same. Usually that is not always 100% of the cases.

<p class="noindent"> for those exceptions (AKA Flush left)


so your CSS would be:

p {text-indent: 1.5em; }

.noindent {text-indent: 0;}

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Which would only work is there no other code between the </h2> and the <p>. Quite a few ebooks seem to place images, subheaders, etc. between the chapter header with the </hx> ending tag and the initial p.

Most eBooks have a single line chapter header. So that would work there.

For cases where you have other stuff between the chapter title and the first paragraph, you could use another h like h3 and then code the relevant CSS for that.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by theducks

<p></p> is probably someone writing books like they were on a Typewriter

But as indicated ALL <p> will be treated the same. Usually that is not always 100% of the cases.

<p class="noindent"> for those exceptions (AKA Flush left)


so your CSS would be:

p {text-indent: 1.5em; }

.noindent {text-indent: 0;}

IMHO, <p> CSS would be better off being...

<p> {
  text-indent: 1.2em;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 0;
  widows: 1;
  orphans: 1;
}

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Most eBooks have a single line chapter header. So that would work there.

For cases where you have other stuff between the chapter title and the first paragraph, you could use another h like h3 and then code the relevant CSS for that.

I did a quick check on 114 books. 25 of them had nothing between the chapter title and it's </h?>, the other 89 did have something, chapter subheaders, images, data/time, etc.