The Dreaded Em Dash

AuthorGreg · 07-11-2012, 08:30 PM

The Facts:

My book was written in Word 2010, regular DOC format. I used styles to handle the formatting. MobiPocket rendered a perfect PRC file for the Kindle. No problems, even the em dashes were right.

Using 0.8.11 of Calibre, I'm having no joy with em dashes. I've tried everything. This is what yields me the best results, meaning everything else formats fine except the em dashes: Save Word file to filtered HTML, convert HTML to ePub. Everything formats beautifully except the em dashes, which are rendered as hyphens.

The filtered HTML file uses Windows-1252 encoding. Before the conversion takes place, the HTML file has em dashes in it, such as you would see if you keyed in the shortcut for it. It has no HTML tags to do the trick. The em dashes display properly even in NotePad. I did a search for the em dash character and replaced it with the Windows-1252 HTML tag for the em dash (& # 8 2 1 2 ; -- without the spaces). Calibre still won't output the em dashes correctly.

I've tried converting to MOBI instead, and then to Epub. THAT, for some reason, preserves the em dashes, but it also creates a lot of undesirable formatting results, not the least ugly of which is a lot of em dashes that end up on a line all by themselves.

Since everything displays beautifully with my first enumerated method except for the em dashes, I have to believe there's some reasonable fix for this.

I've Googled high and low for this, but no luck. Any help would be wonderful.

Thank you,

Greg

ldolse · 07-12-2012, 05:52 AM

There are only a couple reasons this might happen, by default Calibre shouldn't be screwing up em-dashes. The most likely culprit is that you have the 'transliterate unicode characters to ASCII' option enabled under 'Look and Feel' in the conversion options.

The second possibility, is more of a long shot, but maybe you have an incorrect input encoding specified - I always make a point of using UTF-8 text files instead of local encodings, but if you're using Windows 1252 make sure you tell Calibre that's your encoding - it's called cp1252 inside of Calibre. You need to go to preferences -> Plugins -> file type plugins, customize the html-to-zip plugin and enter cp1252 in that box.

itimpi · 07-12-2012, 08:08 AM

Have you actually tried this with a more recent release of Calibre? The 0.8.11 release is nearly 50 releases old so it is always possible this is an issue that has since been fixed.

AuthorGreg · 07-12-2012, 11:12 AM

Hello, my friends. Thank you for your replies.

I upgraded to the latest version of Calibre. As advised, I entered cp1252 into preferences -> Plugins -> file type plugins, customize the html-to-zip plugin.

The em dash appears now, but a space is added to either side. Which is odd when you consider it is properly displayed in the Calibre ePub preview viewer correctly. Here are some examples:

In the HTML files (after they're exploded), my paragraph looks like this:

<p class="eBookBody">The girl looked no older than five—the age of his own son.</p>

Here's how it displays in the preview viewer:

The girl looked no older than five—the age of his own son.

But when it displays on the Nook, I get this:

The girl looked no older than five — the age of his own son.

If I could eradicate those spaces, life would be happy.

Do you all reckon this is a fault of Calibre, or of the Nook Simple Touch itself? I know these em dashes can be displayed correctly -- I've seen it correctly rendered in plenty of other books.

Thanks again, guys!

Greg

HarryT · 07-12-2012, 11:19 AM

Have you tried replacing the dash with the HTML entity "—" to see if that helps? That way it should be independent of character encoding.

ldolse · 07-12-2012, 12:04 PM

Sounds to me like the Nook Simple Touch is the problem if the preview in Calibre looked correct. That's still weird though as I'm pretty certain the simple touch uses a very recent Adobe Digital Editions engine, which should work fine. The other possibility is that B&N changed the font and there is something weird with the stock one. It looks like it has six different font options - did you see if they all look the same?

AuthorGreg · 07-12-2012, 12:33 PM

Well....

This is maddening. I don't think Calibre is the issue. The ePub displays one hundred percent correctly on all ePub viewers I have, including the Nook PC Desktop reader, as well as Pubit!'s previewer. The only device that doesn't display it right is the Nook Simple Touch. Any other Nook is fine.

Some of the em dashes displayed correctly within blocks of text that were italicized, about 90 percent. None of this makes sense.

I would ask the Pubit! folks about this, but as any author knows they don't pride themselves on answering support emails, mainly because they just generally don't do it.

Yet, the ebook formatters for the big publishers have it figured out, because on Big-Six published books, the em dashes display perfectly. I reckon I'll have to pay someone to learn the secrets.

Oh, I did replace the em dash with "—" and that just caused the file to truncate at the spot of its first occurrence. That was weird.

Thanks, all!

Greg

theducks · 07-12-2012, 12:42 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

Oh, I did replace the em dash with "&emdash;" and that just caused the file to truncate at the spot of its first occurrence. That was weird.

Thanks, all!

Greg

WRONG name for entity.
&Mdash;(capital emphasis mine)
or the better choice for the dash/minus: &Ndash; (capital emphasis mine)

AuthorGreg · 07-12-2012, 01:11 PM

That was just a typo -- I corrected it. I entered it correctly in the HTML file.

Thanks,

Greg

ldolse · 07-12-2012, 08:15 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

Yet, the ebook formatters for the big publishers have it figured out, because on Big-Six published books, the em dashes display perfectly. I reckon I'll have to pay someone to learn the secrets.

The fact that it worked with italics also points at a default Nook font problem. My guess is that the Big-Six books are using their own embedded font - this is quite common - I believe they do this to guarantee more uniformity across devices and avoid issues exactly like this one. You'd have to strip the DRM to see. The users on the Sigil & epub authoring sub-forums would be better prepared to walk you through how to embed fonts, that's not something you can really do with Calibre, and there are several threads covering how to do that there.

AuthorGreg · 07-12-2012, 10:53 PM

I used Sigil to make an ePub, and the Nook Simple Touch still won't properly display em dashes. I wonder if Barnes & Noble has any idea about this, or if anyone AT ALL is aware of this. I feel very alone...

I'd love to learn about those embedded fonts. I'm a geek.

Thanks!

Greg

ldolse · 07-13-2012, 11:59 AM

http://web.sigil.googlecode.com/git/...ed_fonts.xhtml

I believe you can also use the quality check plugin to search for examples using embedded fonts in your library.

Rockbobster · 07-14-2012, 02:33 PM

I had a text file that had the em-dash throughout. The author liked ending sentences with it. Calibre would output an epub that corrupted it to a black box or other random character, whether in PC based ereader or my Jetbook.

Experimenting with assorted Calibre filters did not repair this, so here is what I did.

I loaded the epub in Sigil. Then I highlighted the first em-dash and copied to clipboard. I called up the search and replace menu, which had the highlighted character in the search field. Then I went to Windows character map and selected an em-dash from there, copied to clipboard and pasted it in the "replace with" field.

I selected to "replace all" in all html files, and a few seconds later it was done. The saved file rendered the em-dashes properly in all my ereaders.

AuthorGreg · 07-14-2012, 04:22 PM

Have you tried it on a Nook Simple Touch, Rock?

I'm in the process of experimenting with the "Prince and the Pauper" ePub that is posted to this forum. Since it is hailed as an ideal ePub, I went in and changed the en-dashes to em-dashes (using Sigil), saved it, and gave it a test run.

The em-dashes display properly on EVERY previewer I've tried -- including Adobe's Digital Editions, Barnes & Noble's Nook PC Desktop reader, Calibre's reader, etc. -- EXCEPT the Barnes & Noble Simple Touch.

So.... there's something different about the Simple Touch. What could it be?

Greg

Funslinger · 07-14-2012, 06:24 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AuthorGreg

Have you tried it on a Nook Simple Touch, Rock?

I'm in the process of experimenting with the "Prince and the Pauper" ePub that is posted to this forum. Since it is hailed as an ideal ePub, I went in and changed the en-dashes to em-dashes (using Sigil), saved it, and gave it a test run.

The em-dashes display properly on EVERY previewer I've tried -- including Adobe's Digital Editions, Barnes & Noble's Nook PC Desktop reader, Calibre's reader, etc. -- EXCEPT the Barnes & Noble Simple Touch.

So.... there's something different about the Simple Touch. What could it be?

Greg

I'm not having a problem with em dashes on my personal ePubs on my Nook Simple Touch.

07-11-2012, 08:30 PM	#1
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	The Dreaded Em Dash The Facts: My book was written in Word 2010, regular DOC format. I used styles to handle the formatting. MobiPocket rendered a perfect PRC file for the Kindle. No problems, even the em dashes were right. Using 0.8.11 of Calibre, I'm having no joy with em dashes. I've tried everything. This is what yields me the best results, meaning everything else formats fine except the em dashes: Save Word file to filtered HTML, convert HTML to ePub. Everything formats beautifully except the em dashes, which are rendered as hyphens. The filtered HTML file uses Windows-1252 encoding. Before the conversion takes place, the HTML file has em dashes in it, such as you would see if you keyed in the shortcut for it. It has no HTML tags to do the trick. The em dashes display properly even in NotePad. I did a search for the em dash character and replaced it with the Windows-1252 HTML tag for the em dash (& # 8 2 1 2 ; -- without the spaces). Calibre still won't output the em dashes correctly. I've tried converting to MOBI instead, and then to Epub. THAT, for some reason, preserves the em dashes, but it also creates a lot of undesirable formatting results, not the least ugly of which is a lot of em dashes that end up on a line all by themselves. Since everything displays beautifully with my first enumerated method except for the em dashes, I have to believe there's some reasonable fix for this. I've Googled high and low for this, but no luck. Any help would be wonderful. Thank you, Greg

07-12-2012, 12:33 PM	#7
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	Well.... This is maddening. I don't think Calibre is the issue. The ePub displays one hundred percent correctly on all ePub viewers I have, including the Nook PC Desktop reader, as well as Pubit!'s previewer. The only device that doesn't display it right is the Nook Simple Touch. Any other Nook is fine. Some of the em dashes displayed correctly within blocks of text that were italicized, about 90 percent. None of this makes sense. I would ask the Pubit! folks about this, but as any author knows they don't pride themselves on answering support emails, mainly because they just generally don't do it. Yet, the ebook formatters for the big publishers have it figured out, because on Big-Six published books, the em dashes display perfectly. I reckon I'll have to pay someone to learn the secrets. Oh, I did replace the em dash with "—" and that just caused the file to truncate at the spot of its first occurrence. That was weird. Thanks, all! Greg Last edited by AuthorGreg; 07-12-2012 at 01:10 PM.

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07-12-2012, 05:52 AM	#2
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	There are only a couple reasons this might happen, by default Calibre shouldn't be screwing up em-dashes. The most likely culprit is that you have the 'transliterate unicode characters to ASCII' option enabled under 'Look and Feel' in the conversion options. The second possibility, is more of a long shot, but maybe you have an incorrect input encoding specified - I always make a point of using UTF-8 text files instead of local encodings, but if you're using Windows 1252 make sure you tell Calibre that's your encoding - it's called cp1252 inside of Calibre. You need to go to preferences -> Plugins -> file type plugins, customize the html-to-zip plugin and enter cp1252 in that box.

07-12-2012, 08:08 AM	#3
itimpi Wizard Posts: 4,552 Karma: 950151 Join Date: Nov 2008 Device: Sony PRS-950, iphone/ipad (Marvin/iBooks/QuickReader)	Have you actually tried this with a more recent release of Calibre? The 0.8.11 release is nearly 50 releases old so it is always possible this is an issue that has since been fixed.

07-12-2012, 11:12 AM	#4
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	Hello, my friends. Thank you for your replies. I upgraded to the latest version of Calibre. As advised, I entered cp1252 into preferences -> Plugins -> file type plugins, customize the html-to-zip plugin. The em dash appears now, but a space is added to either side. Which is odd when you consider it is properly displayed in the Calibre ePub preview viewer correctly. Here are some examples: In the HTML files (after they're exploded), my paragraph looks like this: <p class="eBookBody">The girl looked no older than five—the age of his own son.</p> Here's how it displays in the preview viewer: The girl looked no older than five—the age of his own son. But when it displays on the Nook, I get this: The girl looked no older than five — the age of his own son. If I could eradicate those spaces, life would be happy. Do you all reckon this is a fault of Calibre, or of the Nook Simple Touch itself? I know these em dashes can be displayed correctly -- I've seen it correctly rendered in plenty of other books. Thanks again, guys! Greg

07-12-2012, 11:19 AM	#5
HarryT eBook Enthusiast Posts: 85,544 Karma: 93383043 Join Date: Nov 2006 Location: UK Device: Kindle Oasis 2, iPad Pro 10.5", iPhone 6	Have you tried replacing the dash with the HTML entity "—" to see if that helps? That way it should be independent of character encoding.

07-12-2012, 12:04 PM	#6
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	Sounds to me like the Nook Simple Touch is the problem if the preview in Calibre looked correct. That's still weird though as I'm pretty certain the simple touch uses a very recent Adobe Digital Editions engine, which should work fine. The other possibility is that B&N changed the font and there is something weird with the stock one. It looks like it has six different font options - did you see if they all look the same?

07-12-2012, 01:11 PM	#9
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	That was just a typo -- I corrected it. I entered it correctly in the HTML file. Thanks, Greg

07-12-2012, 10:53 PM	#11
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	I used Sigil to make an ePub, and the Nook Simple Touch still won't properly display em dashes. I wonder if Barnes & Noble has any idea about this, or if anyone AT ALL is aware of this. I feel very alone... I'd love to learn about those embedded fonts. I'm a geek. Thanks! Greg

07-13-2012, 11:59 AM	#12
ldolse Wizard Posts: 1,337 Karma: 123455 Join Date: Apr 2009 Location: Malaysia Device: PRS-650, iPhone	http://web.sigil.googlecode.com/git/...ed_fonts.xhtml I believe you can also use the quality check plugin to search for examples using embedded fonts in your library.

07-14-2012, 02:33 PM	#13
Rockbobster Member Posts: 13 Karma: 9998 Join Date: Feb 2011 Location: West Coast Device: Handspring Visor, Vtech Helio, Dell Axim x50v, Jetbook Lite, HTC Eris	I had a text file that had the em-dash throughout. The author liked ending sentences with it. Calibre would output an epub that corrupted it to a black box or other random character, whether in PC based ereader or my Jetbook. Experimenting with assorted Calibre filters did not repair this, so here is what I did. I loaded the epub in Sigil. Then I highlighted the first em-dash and copied to clipboard. I called up the search and replace menu, which had the highlighted character in the search field. Then I went to Windows character map and selected an em-dash from there, copied to clipboard and pasted it in the "replace with" field. I selected to "replace all" in all html files, and a few seconds later it was done. The saved file rendered the em-dashes properly in all my ereaders.

07-14-2012, 04:22 PM	#14
AuthorGreg Connoisseur Posts: 61 Karma: 10 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Nook Simple Touch, Kindle 2nd Gen, Kindle 7" Fire HD	Have you tried it on a Nook Simple Touch, Rock? I'm in the process of experimenting with the "Prince and the Pauper" ePub that is posted to this forum. Since it is hailed as an ideal ePub, I went in and changed the en-dashes to em-dashes (using Sigil), saved it, and gave it a test run. The em-dashes display properly on EVERY previewer I've tried -- including Adobe's Digital Editions, Barnes & Noble's Nook PC Desktop reader, Calibre's reader, etc. -- EXCEPT the Barnes & Noble Simple Touch. So.... there's something different about the Simple Touch. What could it be? Greg

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