[davidfor]

Originally Posted by SJC-Caron

There are several fanfics that I find my self re-reading with some frequency, so I wanted to get an off-line version of these files for my Kobo e-reader. Since existing direct-from-fanfic-websites extractors have various problems for me, I decided to extract and format the text myself (personal use only of course).

I assume that means FanFicFare is out.

As I have no programing experience I would rather do as much as possible in Microsoft Word and avoid playing around with HTML tags in the Caliber epub editor as much as possible. I have tried this once before and noticed that the embedded fonts looked noticeably different on my Kobo (fonts set to publisher default) then on my computer in both MS Word and the Calibre epub viewer.

My questions are as follows:

1) How do I force sections of text not to be user modifiable on a e-reader? eg: keep chapter headings in publisher default font (eg: a handwriting font) while letting the user select his/her font preferences for the main body of text; keep a quote center-justified while letting the user select the text justification for the rest of the text.

As you are talking about a Kobo device and kepubs, for the fonts, if you are selecting the "Publisher Defaults" option and the fonts are not displayed properly, then either they are not defined correctly in the CSS and HTML, or they are named incorrectly in the file. Or of course, you forgot to embed the font file.

For the justification, you can't. The setting overrides all the justification in the book. After all, how is the device supposed to know which is to be overridden and which isn't.

2) How do I ensure that chapters don't end on a blank page on e-readers?

Make sure there is nothing between the end of the text and the next chapter. When cleaning up books, I find a lot of them have paragraphs at the end with a single non-breaking space or a series of br tags.

5) Any other advice for this project?

Give in and learn some HTML. In the long run, it will be easier.