RTF conversion problem - no page breaks

[jhsrennie]

I have the following RTF (hand written for this test!) saved as test.rtf:

{\rtf1\ansi
{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}}
{\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sa200\cf1\lang2057\f0
\fs28 Citizen of the Galaxy\fs24
\par Robert A. Heinlein
\par Copyright 1957
\page\par\fs28 Chapter 1\fs24
\par "Lot ninety-seven," the auctioneer announced. "A boy."
}

If I open this in Word it shows the page break before the chapter as expected. If I convert it to MOBI or PDF using:

ebook-convert test.rtf .mobi

or

ebook-convert test.rtf .pdf

then the resulting output file does not have a page break before the chapter. ebook-convert --version gives me:

ebook-convert.exe (calibre 0.7.23)
Created by: Kovid Goyal <kovid@kovidgoyal.net>

Thanks,

John Rennie

[kovidgoyal]

Your version of calibre is ancient. Though, IIRC, the RTF input plugin doesn;t support page breaks. Use one of the many page break insertion options for ebook-convert instead.

[jhsrennie]

Hi Kovid, thanks for the reply. I've upgraded to 0.8.5 but as you say the \page still does nothing.

If I use Word to create an RTF file the page breaks do work; well they work when creating .mobi files though curiously not when creating .pdf files. However Word creates very convoluted RTF and I haven't yet worked out what the significant difference is.

What page break insertion options for ebook-convert should I look at? Possibly --page-breaks-before?

Thanks,

John Rennie

[jhsrennie]

PS given the RTF I posted above, can anyone suggest what the argument to --page-breaks-before should be to put the page break where the \page is? I'm struggling to understand the XPath syntax.

Thanks,

John Rennie

[kovidgoyal]

Try opening your word produced rtf in wordpad and saving it, that should simplify it a little.

[jhsrennie]

I worked through the RTF generated by Word, and this does cause ebook-convert to generate a page break if it's converting to .mobi, but strangely I still get no page break when converting to .pdf:

{\rtf1\ansi
{\fonttbl{\f0\fswiss\fprq2\fcharset0 Arial;}}
{\colortbl ;\red0\green0\blue0;}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sa200\cf1\lang2057\f0
\fs28 Citizen of the Galaxy\fs24
\par Robert A. Heinlein
\par Copyright 1957
{\par \page }
\fs28 Chapter 1\fs24
\par "Lot ninety-seven," the auctioneer announced. "A boy."
}

The only difference is using:

{\par \page }
\fs28 Chapter 1\fs24

instead of:

\page\par\fs28 Chapter 1\fs24

though why that should make a difference I don't know.

I read up on XPath, but as far as I can see it's a method for identifying nodes in XML. If I wanted to use --page-breaks-before would I have to convert to XML then convert to PDF?

[kovidgoyal]

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/conv...ture-detection

[jackie_w]

@jhsrennie,

You could try the following approach:

Open your RTF in Word and style every chapter heading with one of Word's built-in Heading styles 'Heading 1' or 'Heading 2'. Save the RTF and try again.

If you set the --chapter-mark option to "pagebreak" then Calibre's default --chapter option should put pagebreaks before each chapter.

I would post a sample CLI command for you but I'm afraid I always use the Calibre GUI.