Page Breaks and formatting

[A.N.Mouse]

So, I learned enough to get Calibre to convert my rtfs into an epub. All of the content seems to be there.

But, it's throwing in random page breaks where they have no need to be, and when I try to put them in the code, it renders the file unusable.

I'm using <div style=”page-break-before:always;”></div> to signal for it to stop the page there, but clearly it is not doing what I need.

I'd love any assistance anyone could give me.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by A.N.Mouse

So, I learned enough to get Calibre to convert my rtfs into an epub. All of the content seems to be there.

But, it's throwing in random page breaks where they have no need to be, and when I try to put them in the code, it renders the file unusable.

I'm using <div style=”page-break-before:always;”></div> to signal for it to stop the page there, but clearly it is not doing what I need.

I'd love any assistance anyone could give me.

Could you to attach a sample converted RTF to a message. It makes it a lot easier to debug any issues.

[Brett Merkey]

"I'm using <div style=”page-break-before:always;”></div> to signal for it to stop the page there, but clearly it is not doing what I need."

My experience has been that many html user agents do not support page-break rules applied from inline attributes. Best to apply from stylesheet. In any case, the page-break rules are not supported from empty DIV tags:

https://www.w3schools.com/cssref/pr_print_pageba.asp

[A.N.Mouse]

Okay so
First two are examples of what I'm looking at when I'm trying to edit it in Calibre. The third one is KDP's response when I try to upload anything with the page break code above.

The text sample contains the biggest part of my issue. It splits the table of contents in half every time, despite there being plenty of room for it. This sample doesn't have the manual page breaks I had been using for the full document, I actually removed them in the hopes that it would simplify what I was looking at in Calibre so I could put the page breaks back in myself (seeing as it was largely ignoring them anyway).

The page is formatted 6x9, like it was for print. I'm not sure if that would change anything.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by A.N.Mouse

Okay so
First two are examples of what I'm looking at when I'm trying to edit it in Calibre. The third one is KDP's response when I try to upload anything with the page break code above.

The text sample contains the biggest part of my issue. It splits the table of contents in half every time, despite there being plenty of room for it. This sample doesn't have the manual page breaks I had been using for the full document, I actually removed them in the hopes that it would simplify what I was looking at in Calibre so I could put the page breaks back in myself (seeing as it was largely ignoring them anyway).

The page is formatted 6x9, like it was for print. I'm not sure if that would change anything.

I had a quick look at the rtf and the calibre conversion to epub. Calibre's viewer was not happy with the table of contents until I increased the width.

Basically, I would forget about formatting for a page size -- epub is generally used for reflowable books in contrast to PDF which is page oriented. What I saw as a more serious issue is that the sections are not separated into separate text files. I did a quick manual split on the original file removing a lot of the blank lines used to separate pages in the rtf. For the table of contents, the page number are iffy and you might want to make the text a link instead of plain text (I added a sample link for the Introduction).

[Divingduck]

Some additional general tips:

A better way of formatting is using styles instead of manual manipulations like adding lines for a page layout in Word. A TOC should be generated within Word by using headline styles. calibre will recognize headline styles as TOC. Save a document in format DOCX and not RTF. This format is much better supported from calibre as RTF and you can open it directly with the editor.

A well formatted Word document will be a much better source file. You can open the DOCX file directly in calibre editor with repeatable results all the time (or as conversion) and you then only need the editor as fine tuning tool (and/or for checking how it looks as EPUB).

Take a close look to the calibre manual. There you will find a comprehensive DOCX example and how to use Word styles in combination with calibre editor. This will answer most of your questions how to make a much better source document for building a EPUB.
https://manual.calibre-ebook.com/con...-specific-tips (Convert Microsoft Word documents)
https://calibre-ebook.com/downloads/demos/demo.docx