Indenting and "Remove line

[saxondawg]

Like many, I hate lines between every paragraph--but hate to lose the line between SETS of paragraph that establishes a scene change in many novels. In other words, I'm hesitant to check "remove lines between paragraphs" because I will delete some of the author's formatting this way.

However, if I don't check that "remove" box, I then have no control over the indent size--and the indent seems to go from 1.5 em to something too small. This puzzles me. How can I guarantee a 1.5 em paragraph indent without removing ALL blank lines between paragraphs? And just out of curiosity, why should that control be taken away from us if we don't check the box?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by saxondawg

Like many, I hate lines between every paragraph--but hate to lose the line between SETS of paragraph that establishes a scene change in many novels. In other words, I'm hesitant to check "remove lines between paragraphs" because I will delete some of the author's formatting this way.

However, if I don't check that "remove" box, I then have no control over the indent size--and the indent seems to go from 1.5 em to something too small. This puzzles me. How can I guarantee a 1.5 em paragraph indent without removing ALL blank lines between paragraphs? And just out of curiosity, why should that control be taken away from us if we don't check the box?

Welcome to why I use Sigil to fine tune.

I just identify the class being used for the Paragraph and edit that in the stylesheet.
I like both paragraph gaps AND Indent
I use .5em for the top paragraph margin (using a bottom margin may cause a blank pag on the last P)
I got tired of trying to figure out how to get the body class to use/arrive at font-size: 1.2em
so I just *fix* those (along with other corrections/adjustments) with sigil

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by saxondawg

However, if I don't check that "remove" box, I then have no control over the indent size--and the indent seems to go from 1.5 em to something too small. This puzzles me. How can I guarantee a 1.5 em paragraph indent without removing ALL blank lines between paragraphs?

I second theducks suggestion of using Sigil to fine tune your books'

Originally Posted by saxondawg

And just out of curiosity, why should that control be taken away from us if we don't check the box?

The remove line and indent size was implemented as one combined feature.

Calibre was never intended for fine tuning a book, but early on (about 4 years ago) folks were clamoring for some help in this area so Kovid created this feature. The thought being if you removed the lines between paragraphs then you would require an indent to let you know where the new paragraph started and if you left the spaces in between paragraphs then indents weren't as critical.

Since then Sigil has been developed and allows you to adjust the paragraph CSS for indents and margins quite easily. Even Calibre now has the ability for you to unpack a book and manually edit the CSS.

[theducks]

An otherwise 'clean' ebook takes a couple of minutes to do a quick tuneup with Sigil. That includes Validating, removing unused CSS entries.

[saxondawg]

I've manually fine-tuned CSS code in the past, but it just seems like this one important little tweak wouldn't be hard to put into the Calibre conversion process. If I knew what the CSS coding would be for Calibre's own fine-tuning (maybe someone can help) I would put it in myself. I made one try--sure something's wrong with my form--and it didn't work.

<style>
p {text-indent:25px;}
</style>

[saxondawg]

EDIT: I did pretty quickly figure out how to do this in Sigil. It's certainly relatively efficient--just something i never had to add to the Calibre conversion until recently. i assume I have to first convert to epub (since I don't use that format) and then back to the mobi that I use for Kindle. It's a better solution than none, but I want to figure out how to do this in Calibre fine-tuning. But all in all, this isn't a huge issue anyway. I can certainly read with small indents.