Calibre Inserting Its Own CSS Classes

[Xopher H]

I'm a little bit confused about something. I sent a draft of an epub conversion to a client to check out. He went in with the "tweak ePub" feature to make some edits to the text, and the resulting document that he sent back has some pretty radical differences from the one I sent: two CSS files have disappeared, leaving only the style.css file, and that one has several numbered "Calibre" classes. (e.g., calibre1, calibre2, etc.) What's going on? I've never had this issue when I exploded and rebuilt Calibre files myself.

[ldolse]

You would only see css styles like that if he did an ePub to ePub conversion - one of the major reasons Tweak ePub was created was to avoid having Calibre manipulate the css the way it does in a full conversion.

If his edits were actually edits to the content and not formatting, and you need to find and merge them into your original ePub the simplest method I've found is to convert both versions to txt - I usually enable smarten punctuation under look and feel to attempt to normalize the txt across both versions. Then compare the two versions in a diff tool - I've found P4merge (free download) seems to work best with book length docs.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Xopher H

I'm a little bit confused about something. I sent a draft of an epub conversion to a client to check out. He went in with the "tweak ePub" feature to make some edits to the text, and the resulting document that he sent back has some pretty radical differences from the one I sent: two CSS files have disappeared, leaving only the style.css file, and that one has several numbered "Calibre" classes. (e.g., calibre1, calibre2, etc.) What's going on? I've never had this issue when I exploded and rebuilt Calibre files myself.

I hate to say this, but once you have the ePub made, don't let Calibre make any changes to it. I've found Calibre can do some pretty funky things to perfectly good ePub code.

I use Notepad++ since it allows me to have multiple tabs, regex, and search/replace across tabs. I use Forefox to view the XML files and if they look OK, I put the ePub back together and have a look in ADE.