Best way to format quotes?

[ficbot]

I am putting together some ebooks off of a public domain website (The Baldwin Project) for my own reading and use. I have found that the book chapters, which I am cutting and pasting straight into Sigil, are blessedly composed of good, clean HTML. They are pasting in as <div> </div> paragraphs; I have been replacing the <div> tags with <p> tags and adding heading formatting to use for the table of contents, and the books are coming out looking very nice.

The only problem I am having is that these books cite a lot of poetry in them as brief little quotes at the top of the chapter. When I import the books into Calibre, I re-convert them to epub to remove the spacing between paragraphs and add an indent, and this is messing up how the quotes look.

If I can use special formatting on these before I convert them to set off the text as a blockquote, will they stay formatted as I want to once Calibre adds the indents? Or should I convert them as I have been, then go back and edit the quote parts after, as a blockquote or centred line or something? What is the best practice for this sort of thing?

Finally, not related to the above question, but I am wondering if its okay to share the books here. The website posts books which are all in the public domain, so technically the text of free for grabs. And I am doing my own formatting and tweaking of it. But the site's editor did take original page scans, clean them up and put in her own work on them. So should I just keep them for personal use, or given that the texts are public domain, is it ok to share them?

[Toxaris]

I would advise not to use Calibre for that, but make the changes in your stylesheet yourself. Calibre makes a mess out of the stylesheet and will mess up your code.

[Jellby]

Originally Posted by ficbot

If I can use special formatting on these before I convert them to set off the text as a blockquote, will they stay formatted as I want to once Calibre adds the indents? Or should I convert them as I have been, then go back and edit the quote parts after, as a blockquote or centred line or something? What is the best practice for this sort of thing?

I would recommend learning some CSS, and formating with something like:

<h1>Chapter 4</h1>

<div class="epigraph">
<div class="line">’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves</div>
<div class="line">Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:</div>
<div class="line">All mimsy were the borogoves,</div>
<div class="line">And the mome raths outgrabe.</div>
</div>

<p>After three whole chapters of adventures, the fourth chapter starts here...</p>

One could be less verbose in the epigraph coding too. The CSS will make sure the epigraph's alignment and margins are correct, and the poem lines are formatted accordingly. Have a look at this thread for some ideas.

Finally, not related to the above question, but I am wondering if its okay to share the books here. The website posts books which are all in the public domain, so technically the text of free for grabs. And I am doing my own formatting and tweaking of it. But the site's editor did take original page scans, clean them up and put in her own work on them. So should I just keep them for personal use, or given that the texts are public domain, is it ok to share them?

If the author (and translator, and illustrator, etc.) died more than 70 years ago, it's OK to post it here. But if there is extra content (commentaries, notes, etc.) you should consider this content's author too. In any case, it's of course good manners to at least acknowledge the source of your text.