Hi, long time (if casual) calibre user and I've visted the forum many times for help, but first post!
I'm hoping someone can help with an issue that's driving me up the wall. I usually download ebooks as epubs, but I read them on a Kindle (paperwhite now), so I have to convert them to mobi in order to do so - I've prettymuch just used default settings the whole time.
I'd noticed that section breaks / scene breaks (basically the blank line you see between two scenes) was barely noticeable on my paperwhite. I initially assumed it was to do with the device as I didn't remember it happening on my old kindle, but I investigated further today and I can see the issue in the calibre viewer, and found that calibre is greatly reducing the 'margin-top' of the CSS the book I was looking at uses (I'm guessing the others will be the same).
You can see here the original format:
![]()
However, when I convert to mobi, it's renaming the classes (I'm led to understand this is usual behaviour for this conversion) but also changing the top margin from 14px to 5pt, which is not equivalent - it's far smaller, and barely noticeable on the kindle.
You can see here the converted format:
![]()
Now I have tried fixing this, but I'm getting nowhere. I've tried adding in additional options using Styling and Transform styles:
![]()
Initially I had only the 5pt in and that didn't seem to change the output at all, just leaving it as 5pt as in the basic conversion, but when I have added 14px - 20pt conversion, even more bizarrely, Calibre has converted this to 1em:
![]()
This does sort of address the issue of not being able to see the breaks, but it also makes them bigger than other line breaks and looks wrong on the kindle - but more to the point, it's not what I specified! I can get them to be the same (15pt) by specifying that instead, but it still looks smaller on the kindle than I'd like, so ideally I need to adjust them both, but I feel I'll be just hitting the same issue again.
So I'm hoping someone can tell me if there's some option I'm missing or some easy way of converting this to actually reflect the options I want - or if it's not possible to convert it precisely, at least put me out of my misery.
tl:dr - I want to convert from epub to mobi without it adjusting the margins on the CSS, or at least be able to control it myself!
I'd also like to be able to... re-convert some of my existing mobi files for while I no longer have the epubs - another reason I need to work out how to do this properly.
Any help anyone can give is appreciated, happy to provide more details of my config if required, as whilst I'm fairly technically minded I'm a novice Calibre user at best.
I'm hoping someone can help with an issue that's driving me up the wall. I usually download ebooks as epubs, but I read them on a Kindle (paperwhite now), so I have to convert them to mobi in order to do so - I've prettymuch just used default settings the whole time.
I'd noticed that section breaks / scene breaks (basically the blank line you see between two scenes) was barely noticeable on my paperwhite. I initially assumed it was to do with the device as I didn't remember it happening on my old kindle, but I investigated further today and I can see the issue in the calibre viewer, and found that calibre is greatly reducing the 'margin-top' of the CSS the book I was looking at uses (I'm guessing the others will be the same).
You can see here the original format:
However, when I convert to mobi, it's renaming the classes (I'm led to understand this is usual behaviour for this conversion) but also changing the top margin from 14px to 5pt, which is not equivalent - it's far smaller, and barely noticeable on the kindle.
You can see here the converted format:
Now I have tried fixing this, but I'm getting nowhere. I've tried adding in additional options using Styling and Transform styles:
Initially I had only the 5pt in and that didn't seem to change the output at all, just leaving it as 5pt as in the basic conversion, but when I have added 14px - 20pt conversion, even more bizarrely, Calibre has converted this to 1em:
This does sort of address the issue of not being able to see the breaks, but it also makes them bigger than other line breaks and looks wrong on the kindle - but more to the point, it's not what I specified! I can get them to be the same (15pt) by specifying that instead, but it still looks smaller on the kindle than I'd like, so ideally I need to adjust them both, but I feel I'll be just hitting the same issue again.
So I'm hoping someone can tell me if there's some option I'm missing or some easy way of converting this to actually reflect the options I want - or if it's not possible to convert it precisely, at least put me out of my misery.
tl:dr - I want to convert from epub to mobi without it adjusting the margins on the CSS, or at least be able to control it myself!
I'd also like to be able to... re-convert some of my existing mobi files for while I no longer have the epubs - another reason I need to work out how to do this properly.
Any help anyone can give is appreciated, happy to provide more details of my config if required, as whilst I'm fairly technically minded I'm a novice Calibre user at best.