Removing unnecessary line breaks in books.

[DoctorOhh]

Let me start by saying up front I might not understand the problem, but I'm guessing one of my suggestions will work for you

Originally Posted by Wintersdark

I tried converting to text and back, but the way it's formatted I basically get each paragraph followed by a pair of CR/LF's. So, converting directly back to epub doesn't help.

According to this thread calibre looks for two consecutive CR/LFs to identify a paragraph. When converting back to ePub you might have to change the settings in the text input area while converting.

Originally Posted by Wintersdark

However, as it's not every book, I'm just addressing it on a case by case basis with Notepad++ as I go. If I were still running linux, I'd mass convert them all to text and figure out how to script applying the regex replace to them, but I have no idea of how to go about that in windows.

When I have text I need to put back into form with proper word-wrapped paragraphs so I can get a clean epub upon conversion I use Openoffice.org's Writer program with the My Text Cleaner extension installed. I select the whole document and run the extension. It does a good job of reassembling the paragraphs.

Alternatively I can often use Sigil's find and replace to fix ePubs as long as there is something unique to denote paragraph breaks in the output. Often I find a

<p class=calibre9></p>

or similar marking between what should be each paragraph. If this exists then it is only 2 or 3 steps to clean it up.

Good Luck.

[ldolse]

Calibre 0.7.16 enables the preprocessing option for lit, txt, rtf, and html input types. It will attempt to unwrap lines and also mark chapters in books where chapter headings previously weren't marked.

Select "preprocess input to possibly improve structure detection" under the Structure Detection options in conversion for a bad book to have Calibre attempt to fix the markup. If you're dealing with a troublesome text file then you should also choose "Treat each line as a paragraph" under text input.

It seems to work ok on the books I've tested, but I know there is a pretty large variety of badly formatted books coming from OCR sources, etc. Let me know if there are books that fail to unwrap. I'm also interested in books that have text formatting that traverses lines. I think that should be ok, but I didn't have any test cases.

[medved13]

texthandler.com can help you to remove unnecessary line breaks from text