[Plugin] CustomCleanerPlus

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

Just to be absolutely clear. When I say "empty span tags" I mean span tags that have nothing inside them -- no classes, style or any other attributes. Example below:

<h1 class="heading"><span>CHAPTER 1</span></h1>

Whereas "a naked span tag" I think refers to a span tag containing perhaps some text on it's own line in the html that is not surrounded by any other html tags. That's my understanding of "naked spans" anyway. As well, "naked spans" surrounding text or whatever can also contain classes, style and other attributes.

Generally, as a rule, I always try and avoid using both "empty span tags" and "naked span tags" in my own epubs. In most instances, empty spans serve no earthly purpose and naked spans alone on there own line(not surrounded by <div> tags) will always give you an error whenever you run FlightCrew or Epubcheck.

The problem is that in your example is that the span following the h1 could be defined in the style sheet as part of a combinator selector (h1 span, h1 > span, h1 + span or h1 ~ span). So an empty span may still have an effect on the text.
As an example, in the ebook I was having fun with, this was in the stylesheet:

h1 + span {
  font-size: 1.5rem;
}

Now a piece of code that shows:

<span><span>
or
<span class="whatever"></span>

can be safely dumped.

[DiapDealer]

I'm not insisting that people adopt my terminology. I was just trying to figure out exactly what people were discussing. But having said that, "empty span" still makes no sense to me when used to describe spans that contain text content between them. I use "naked" to describe tags that are devoid of any attributes. I never hear anyone referring to empty paragraph tags (except where <p></p> was used in an attempt to create vertical space). Yet there are probably more "empty paragraphs" (to use the current empty span parlance) than empty spans.

In the end... as long as I know what's being described, feel free to call them whatever you (rhetorical) want. *shrug*

[slowsmile]

@DNSB...As as habit, I usually always try to keep my epub CSS as simple as possible for my own ebooks. By that I mean that I never use combinators and such. There's no need for using combinators in the CSS styling for my own ebooks.

Also, since I have already said in a separate post above that I will be adding an option for removing empty spans only, this should hopefully satisfy and protect your need to use span combinators in your CSS whenever you use the plugin. Of course, if you choose not to use the plugin's new "Remove empty spans" option(coming soon in an update) then please be aware that any unwanted empty spans that ARE empty spans(not combinators) in your epub will not be removed.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

Also, since I have already said in a separate post above that I will be adding an option for removing empty spans only, this should hopefully satisfy and protect your need to use span combinators in your CSS whenever you use the plugin. Of course, if you choose not to use the plugin's new "Remove empty spans" option(coming soon in an update) then please be aware that any unwanted empty spans that ARE empty spans(not combinators) in your epub will not be removed.

As I've mentioned before, this is not my need or desire to use span combinators but rather my lack of desire to rewrite the css from an ebook created by someone else to remove the use of combinators by others. Since CustomCleanerPlus made no mention of removing a span with no class, I was rather surprised to notice it was removing them.

[slowsmile]

Plugin Update(v0.5.3)

Includes the following fixes and new features:

• Added a new dialog option to remove line-height properties from the CSS.
  
• Added a new dialog option to remove all empty spans in the epub html. This option only removes span tags that contain no formatting -- i.e. that contain no classes, style or any other attributes.
  
• The "Remove all ids/bookmarks" option now also removes id fragments from all internal links and from the links in the OPF guide section as well.
  
• The original dialog window was becoming too large, so I've split it into 2 separate, simplified dialog windows.
  
• Increased the width of both new dialog windows(by 50 pixels) to accommodate the width difference between Windows and Linux HD displays.
  
  

[slowsmile]

@DiapDealer...Could you please let me know if the plugin dialog window display widths are OK now on your Linux machine? I increased the widths of both dialog windows(for Linux only) by 50 pixels which should hopefully be enough. Unfortunately, I don't have Linux Mint on my new PC for testing at present, but I will be adding it soon.

[DNSB]

I've run into another issue. The book has what is supposed to be alien speech and the author used << and >> as quotation marks. The << gets converted to &lt;&lt; which CustomCleanerPlus seems unhappy with. After noticing this, I converted the << and >> to left/right guillemets ( « and » ) so not sure if the &gt;&gt; pair would also cause issues.

<p><b>The speaker to others replied &lt;&lt;corn dogs!&gt;&gt;</b></p>

After running CustomCleanerPlus and saying yes to continuing:

  <p><b>The speaker to others replied &lt;



  <corn dogs!="">&gt;</corn>
  </b></p>

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

@DiapDealer...Could you please let me know if the plugin dialog window display widths are OK now on your Linux machine? I increased the widths of both dialog windows(for Linux only) by 50 pixels which should hopefully be enough. Unfortunately, I don't have Linux Mint on my new PC for testing at present, but I will be adding it soon.

Sorry. I missed this. I'll do my best to test it out this weekend.

[DiapDealer]

OK. The first shot is how it looks after the dialog opens on it own.



The second shot shows what it looks like when I expand the dialog horizontally as far as it will allow me.



The third shot is the dialog expanded vertically and horizontally as far as it will let me.



This is using v0.5.4 of the plugin from the first post.
The only way I can see all of the content is to maximize the dialog (which, of course, fills the entire screen).

This is Arch Linux using 3840x2160 resolution and a monitor scale of 175%

[slowsmile]

@DiapDealer...Thanks for testing the dialogs and for showing the images. All I can really do to solve this resolution issue would be to increase the maxsize of the width and height for all dialogs, which will at least allow the user to stretch the height and width to their own preference or to just click to fullscreen size. I'll incorporate this fix into the next plugin update for this plugin coming out shortly.

[DNSB]

I ran into a rather odd glitch. One author that I do so work with changed the program they used to generate ePubs. One result is the misuse of <i> tags.

This is what I would expect to see:

<i>This is an italic sentence</i>.

This is what the misbegotten program generates:

<i>This</i><i> </i><i>is</i><i> </i><i>an</i><i> </i><i>italic</i><i> </i><i>sentence</i>.

And CustomCleanerPlus removes the <i> </i> strings so what pops out is:

<i>This</i><i>is</i><i>an</i><i>italic</i><i>sentence</i>.

Thisisanitalicsentence.

I worked around it by converting the <i> </i> to a simple space (ditto for the <b> </b> but they were a lot rarer before doing much else.

[slowsmile]

@DNSB . . . I'm really not sure what you are talking about wrt the CustomCleanerPlus plugin because that plugin certainly does not have the capability to add <i></i> tags around any selected text. My plugin can't do that in other words.

However, the plugin does give you the option to select the Convert <i>, <b>, <em>, <u>, <s> and <strong> tags to span styling which will, for example, convert any <i></i> tags to their <span> tag equivalent, like this:

Converts from this:

<p><i>This is an italic sentence</i></p>

To this:

<p><span style="font-style: italic;">This is an italic sentence</span></p>

But there's just no way that my plugin can add <i></i> tags to specific text. After all, why would I add such a feature to my plugin when you can already add and remove <i></i> tags in Sigil without using any plugin?

And I've also just tested that particular plugin feature again and it seems to work as I've described without any problems at all.

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by slowsmile

There's just no way that my plugin can add <i></i> tags to specific text. After all, why would I add such a feature to my plugin when you can already add and remove <i></i> tags in Sigil without using any plugin?

The problem is that the <i> </i> is converted to an <i></i>. Soyougettoreadthesentencewithnospaces. This does not seem to happen if other text is inside the tags only with spaces.

<body>
  <p>This<i> </i>is<i> </i>an<i> </i>italic<i> </i>sentence.</p>
</body>

After running CustomCleanerPlus with no options selected:

<body>
  <p>This<i></i>is<i></i>an<i></i>italic<i></i>sentence.</p>
</body>

[slowsmile]

Quote by DNSB:
"The problem is that the <i> </i> is converted to an <i></i>."

As I've already said, the plugin doesn't work like that. It doesn't or shouldn't add <i></i> tags and shouldn't affect the text spacing in between any <i></i> tags. Period. But the plugin does give you the option to convert the <i></i> tags in your epub to their <span> equivalents. And when my plugin converts the <i></i> tags to their <span> equivalents, all text spacing is preserved.

I've tried to re-create your problem by testing the plugin in various ways and I am unable to emulate your problem. Perhaps if you could specifically walk us through and describe in careful detail exactly what you actually did -- how and what plugin selections you chose etc when you ran the plugin -- to get that problem. That might help us.

[DNSB]

Okay. I opened Sigil with a blank epub. I copy/pasted the following into the blank epub:

<body>
  <p>This<i> </i>is<i> </i>an<i> </i>italic<i> </i>sentence.</p>
</body>

I ran CustomCleanerPlus and clicked the Clear All button and then clicked on OK twice. After CC+ completed, the epub now looked like with the extra blank lines and the <i> </i> showing as <i/>:

</head>

<body>

  <p>This<i/>is<i/>an<i/>italic<i/>sentence.</p>


</body>
</html>

Again, it is not adding the <i></i>, it is replacing <i> </i> with <i/>.