removing extra spaces - kills images

[wmeyer]

I am new to Sigil, and am trying to reformat some files I downloaded from Gutenberg, to clean up some of the more annoying formatting errors in them.

One such is the appearance of extra spaces, that is, more than one space between words. Today, I tried that on a file in which images have been inserted. When the S&R was complete, the images had all been removed.

My process was to use S&R in the book view, and replace all occurrences of two spaces with a single space. This is the process I have used in pretty much every editor I have ever used, but in this instance, I got more than expected.

Can anyone show me the error of my ways, or suggest an alternate solution?

Thanks!

Bill

[Jellby]

Hmm... Maybe the S&R in the book view is seeing "space, image, space" as a double space, an replacing everything with a space?

Go to the code view and see what's the code around the double spaces (it must be more than " ", because any number of consecutive spaces in the code will render as a single space, at most, in book view, unless in a <pre> block), then remove only one of the spaces.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by wmeyer

I am new to Sigil, and am trying to reformat some files I downloaded from Gutenberg, to clean up some of the more annoying formatting errors in them.

One such is the appearance of extra spaces, that is, more than one space between words. Today, I tried that on a file in which images have been inserted. When the S&R was complete, the images had all been removed.

My process was to use S&R in the book view, and replace all occurrences of two spaces with a single space. This is the process I have used in pretty much every editor I have ever used, but in this instance, I got more than expected.

Can anyone show me the error of my ways, or suggest an alternate solution?

Thanks!

Bill

The issue with Book View is there can be a huge amount of code between those spaces (as you seem to have found out) the hard way)

HTML is supposed to ignore multiple spaces(%20 type).
non-breaking spaces (&nbsp; ) can only be replaced in code view
or are you confusing us with Vertical Spacing issues (used to break scenes, among other things.) These could be coded using Margins, BR, a paragraph consisting of a NBSP ... I prefer the paragraph margin method, it allows tweaking the document in a single place: the stylesheet.

[wmeyer]

Thanks. No, I was not confusing literal spaces with vertical space. I realize HTML should ignore embedded spaces, but I am seeing the effect of them on the Kindle, and hadn't really considered that they would have no effect in HTML. However, if they are present in the HTML, do they get passed through to the EPUB output? And then to the MOBI file I convert to with Calibre?

Sorry, I am so new to this, and there are so many steps....

[theducks]

Originally Posted by wmeyer

Thanks. No, I was not confusing literal spaces with vertical space. I realize HTML should ignore embedded spaces, but I am seeing the effect of them on the Kindle, and hadn't really considered that they would have no effect in HTML. However, if they are present in the HTML, do they get passed through to the EPUB output? And then to the MOBI file I convert to with Calibre?

Sorry, I am so new to this, and there are so many steps....

Yes.
To make code readable (to humans), HTML allows white-space in the code to make it easy to read. You could code an entire document without returns and it would still renders the same in a browser.
NBSP's are NOT ignored, set your insert point at a problem (paragraph), then switch to CV and see what is there.
Conversion can make a hash out of poorly coded sources. GIGO still applies