Page break at sentence....?

[se1961]

Originally Posted by davidfor

You have missed something that was sort of suggested. A mention was made of widows and orphans. These are used to keep parts of a paragraph together over the end of a line. The default is 2 or 3.

Is this a setting in Calibre? I have been doing the DOCX formatting after conversion in Calibre, so chose "keep lines together," which does what I need, so I didn't bother with widows and orphans. If that setting is somewhere in Calibre, could you tell me where? I will happily experiment with it.

EDIT: I started digging through old threads and found this:

Originally Posted by ps67

You can change the css in the calibre editor like this:

p{
widows: 1 !important;
orphans: 1 !important;
}

using !important You can overwrite eventual different widows/orphans values in the various p.something tag.

SECOND EDIT: At first the command didn't seem to help me much, but I have just played around with it a LOT, and discovered that it works extremely well to prevent lines from breaking across the page, which is my intention. In the end, I set my widows and orphans to the the number of lines on a PDF page-- in my case, 35 lines of text (setting the number higher keeps longer paragraphs together but breaks text if the paragraph ends up being longer than a page), so I use 35 for both widows and orphans.

Comparing the two outputs (DOCX with "keep lines together" and PDF with widows/orphans) it seems that widows/orphans produces many fewer line breaks across a page-- 11 vs 17 for a full novel. Thank you for this! A simpler solution!

[theducks]

1 means do little to prevent splitting (basically turn it OFF)
3 means keep up to 3 lines together

and, commonly done WRONG: 0 is invalid

[se1961]

Since it seems I will now be using widows/orphans as my conversion process, I have a couple of related questions:

1. If I put the widows/orphans command in the CSS stylesheet, it applies to all of my conversions, not just PDF. I don't want it for MOBI or EPUB conversions-- is there any way to say "ONLY use this command for PDF documents"? No worries if not-- I will just have to remember to delete it.

2. When I convert straight to PDF in Calibre, does Calibre use the font that comes with the original .azw document? I noticed, when I did my comparison, that the DOCX and PDF conversions were using different fonts. I would like to keep my conversion as close to the original text as possible.

Thanks so much for all your help! I'm getting to the end of this, I promise!

[Quoth]

Save a copy of Wordprocessor file
Set suitable Widows and Orphans in paragraph styles.
Save.
Export PDF,

Only use Calibre to convert ebooks to ebooks or docx to ebooks. PDF isn't really an ebook, it's an electronic preview of print, clue in name Portable Document Format. It describes documents for particular sizes of paper page, not screens.

[se1961]

Thank you! Good to know