Removing spacing between paragraphs, not between sections

[jlbfoot]

Let me see if I can explain what I'm trying to accomplish...

When converting ePub to ePub for my custom font CSS, I select the option to "remove spacing between paragraphs", as I like the way I can now see more words per page turn (and the look in general). Oftentimes, books have sections within chapters which are generally separated by more than a single blank line, e.g., when the story jumps from one time-frame to another. When selecting "remove spacing between paragraphs", the double/triple spaces are removed too. I can usually re-orient myself by the context of the story, but it would be easier if that "section" had a blank line separating it from the previous section. (There is probably a proper name for "section", so please excuse my ignorance) Is there a way to set Calibre to retain the spacing between sections, and still remove the default spacing between paragraphs? I am semi-familiar with Sigil, but I'm grasping for automatic! It's asking a lot I know, but I've gotten pretty spoiled by this wonderful program.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by jlbfoot

Oftentimes, books have sections within chapters which are generally separated by more than a single blank line, e.g., when the story jumps from one time-frame to another. When selecting "remove spacing between paragraphs", the double/triple spaces are removed too.

This is the price you pay for using this feature. If you don't wish to lose section breaks then you have to stop using this feature.

Originally Posted by jlbfoot

Is there a way to set Calibre to retain the spacing between sections, and still remove the default spacing between paragraphs? I am semi-familiar with Sigil, but I'm grasping for automatic! It's asking a lot I know, but I've gotten pretty spoiled by this wonderful program.

Calibre is not a ebook editing or creation tool and the remove spacing feature was a large swipe at meeting a requested need.

Since you are familiar with Sigil you can identify the section breaks and replace those breaks with a string like

* * * * * *

Then convert using the remove spaces feature as normal.

[ldolse]

All the options under look and feel only manipulate css, they don't actually change html.

If the section break is actually a blank paragraph then the 'remove spacing between paragraphs' option will not delete the blank paragraph. All that option does is manipulate the CSS, it doesn't actually delete blank lines. On the other hand if it's just a div then you could lose the softbreak, but there will still be a div there, so you could easily find it in Sigil and fix its css.

Now if you're also enabling preprocessing under structure detection then the behavior is different. Preprocessing does change the html. One thing it looks for is if there is an empty paragraph between every full paragraph. If there is, and the user has enabled 'remove paragraph spacing' under look and feel, then it will delete all the blank lines - otherwise the remove paragraph spacing option wouldn't actually work. I haven't looked into solving the softbreak problem here - though now that I think about it it's probably doable. However without knowing what options you've enabled and the way softbreaks are implemented in your doc I don't know whether any of that applies.

[jlbfoot]

Originally Posted by dwanthny

Since you are familiar with Sigil you can identify the section breaks and replace those breaks with a string like *****.
Then convert using the remove spaces feature as normal.

I don't think you know how much that helped. I was thinking backwards. I was wondering how to identify the section breaks after "processing" with Calibre. Following your advice, I first did the conversion from ePub to ePub without the "remove spacing between paragraphs" selected and opened that file in Sigil. It was easy to manually scan the text for breaks, insert ***** and center it, then save the file. I then did a second Epub to Epub conversion in Calibre with the "remove spacing between paragraphs" selected and the final product is perfect! I learned a little about Sigil to boot. Keyboard shortcuts make formatting much quicker. Good formatting makes a book read easier and even more enjoyable to me. Thanks again!

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by jlbfoot

Good formatting makes a book read easier and even more enjoyable to me. Thanks again!

You're welcome, I'm glad you figured out a workable solution.