From ODT to EPUB with love

[roger64]

Thank you for your answer. I dare not customize my 505.

I added your proposal as an extra.css rule.

No change. If I consider a full page of text, I still have on average 25 lines, which I consider to be too much and which also provokes some artefacts.

I would be happy with 21 lines.

I will check my stylesheet.css for line-height.

and then used again my surgical little utility to change every occurence of line-height: 100% to line-height: 120%. This time it did not work and caused a terrible jumble of text which made the file unusable. So I am still stuck with this problem.

So, due to pending problems, I still follow on publishing in PDF and ODT formats.

[roger64]

This question of line-height is finally solved.

The solution lies not with calibre but with OpenOffice.

Before sending the file to calibre to convert, I have to modify my text in OpenOffice by selecting a proportional interline value of 120% for the whole text.

After this, the conversion goes smoothly, and my average page in the epub is 22 lines, which I find pleasant to read. (130% gives 17 lines, which is a little too much space)
Les than 120%, you'll see appear a little blank space created by the footnotes.

Up to now, I keep only two extra.css rules:
.endnote {font-size:10px;}
body {font-family:"Times New Roman", Times, serif;}

It seems though, that for the big files, I have to tweak a little to be sure to get the true TNR serif (see above)

[roger64]

TNR serif 22 lines fresh from OO
(two small images still to be centered)

[roger64]

Then, I published on MR a first "real-size" EPUB book. Some people have no shame...

Here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...t=Capitulation

It includes, among others, graphics, footnotes, TOC and uses of course Times new Roman.

You'll see that some problems, mainly with graphics, are still pending (ticket sent).

Question about the look of a footnote on the reading page

If you look at a page including some footnotes ( I have about 400 of them in the book...), you'll see the "active" one generates a relatively big black shadow box around it. The non-active one is more discrete. The presence of a footnote implies also a rather high line-height that I'd like to reduce a bit..

I would be happy to get advice on how to improve the look of a footnote on the reading page.

[roger64]

About clean CSS files

I just learnt this not too obvious pearl of wisdom about OpenOffice.

If you wish to get a nice clean EPUB calibre code for your CSS file , coming from an OpenOffice odt file, your odt file must of course be at first clean (not encumbered by many useless styles) before being given to calibre.

This "cleanness" depends heavily on user's behaviour and a little about understanding how OpenOffice works. You have to be aware of the following curious phenomenon.

In OpenOffice, you should always modify your styles using F11, selecting one style, right-click, select: modify. You modify this way the normal styles, kept in the style.xml file.

If you proceed directly like this to modify a style: menu Format, Paragraph...you'll create in fact a new and so-called automatic style which will be saved in content.xml. One automatic style could be OK, but beware, if you are used to work this way, it will create in the end a lot of unnecessary (and redundant for the most part) styles, which will give you a "dirty" or very heavy css stylesheet, confusing to modify.

Normal and automatic styles are OpenOffice used expressions, not mine.

So better stick to F11 to practice with styles.

[kovidgoyal]

Good to know, thanks

[pietvo]

On Mac OS X Openoffice.org (that's the official name, btw.) doesn't have F11. There is a menu item Format->Styles and Formatting. Is that the one you mean?

[roger64]

You're right. BTW, I am a GNU-Linux user.

Yes, It's this one. It's opening at least should trigger the F11 window called "Styles and Formatting" (see attachment).

[pietvo]

Yes, that's the same. On Mac OS X is it CMD-T instead of F11.