Phantom page break problem post meatgrinder

[Wulf Anson]

As an SW noob I'm still working my way through the grinder.

I pubbed 3 books as a series. 2 of them contain 1 phantom page break in 1 chapter each.

The Pilcrow shows nothing there. Applying the MS Word 2013 Styles I modified for my normal text have no corrective effect.

Word's page layout paragraph indicates nothing different about the lines where the phantom page break intrudes.

Has anyone else run into this, and have a solution?

Thanks in advance.

[HarryT]

The purpose of this forum is to request help with books that you are intending to upload to the MobileRead library. Is that really what you intend doing?

[Wulf Anson]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The purpose of this forum is to request help with books that you are intending to upload to the MobileRead library. Is that really what you intend doing?

OK. Thanks. If I'm at the wrong site, my apologies.

Smashwords Facebook page is worse than useless.

Could you be so kind as to direct me to a site that Does discuss SW conversion issues?

The related posts titles left me with the impression that SW conversion issues have been discussed here before now, and are archived.

[HarryT]

I'll move your post to our "Writers' Corner" forum, which is more appropriate.

[Wulf Anson]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I'll move your post to our "Writers' Corner" forum, which is more appropriate.

Thank you Harry.

[gmw]

Wulf, did you try the "nuclear" method to make sure you started from a clean document? Word can leave a lot of detritus in its documents after you've been working on them for a while, and that will get picked by Smashwords' very aptly named Meatgrinder (I've only ever used that for short stories, my novels I upload only as EPUB).

What document formats are showing this phantom page break?

Assuming the problem includes EPUB and/or online, have you looked at the HTML and CSS produced? There should be some hints in there as to what is going on, and perhaps where it came from.

[Wulf Anson]

Hi GMW, and thanks.

yes, I went nuclear, 5 times.

Pasted the whole sheebang into notepad and scrubbed out all formatting.

5 times I then reformatted using Styles I modified by selecting a paragraph I had manually formatted as the new definition of the Style I applied to the Entire Manuscript as a starting point, before apply other Styles to my Title page, Copyright page, ToC and Individual Chapter/ToC headings.

My original is in Word 2013.

My submitted to SW's meatgrinder is SAVE AS Word 97-2003. (.doc)

I have tried copying the entire chapter with the phantom page break and nuking it before resubmitting it into Word 2013 or 97-2003, pre Styled or Un Styled.

Always get back from Meatgrinder a half page of blank, white space before my text continues at the top of the next page.

If it was just experimenting with the affected chapters for corrected reconversion, it wouldn't be such a nuisance, but I'm tired of rebuilding 60 plus Chapter, Tables of Bookmarked and Hyperlinked Tables of Contents when I nuke the whole thing.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Wulf Anson

[...]
Always get back from Meatgrinder a half page of blank, white space before my text continues at the top of the next page.[...]

Please be clear about exactly where you are seeing this: What output formats are you checking? Which ones show this result?

For example, if you are only seeing it on the Smashwords online viewer then it may be an artifact of the viewer itself - some viewers intentionally try to avoid breaking paragraphs in awkward places, some do it well, some like the Smashwords online viewer are not so capable.

Make sure the styles you are applying in Word do not apply the orphan or widow options to manage text flow - leave that to viewing software to decide.

Have you checked the EPUB produced? Does it do the same thing? If so, download it and pull it apart. (epub is just zip file, change the filename extension to .zip and you can easily extract the contents.) Now you can study the CSS and xHTML being used.

If you do not know anything about CSS and HTML you will still, hopefully, be able to find the HTML file where the problem exists: open it in notepad and do a search for the text that is being broken. If you copy and paste a few lines either side of the problem and post it here (put it inside CODE tags) then maybe we might be able to help further.