CSS Override Code

[amalthia]

This post is to help anyone who'd like to modify the style or look of the epubs downloaded at the A03 Archive.

I made a new "Extra CSS" code to use in Calibre to convert the A03 epubs to epub. I also found out how to remove underlines on the Chapter links and turn the font back. The purpose of the reconverting is to remove the blank paragraph space and replace it a indent at the start of a new paragraph. During the tests I also found out how to remove the underline on the Chapters so it looks more like a heading and less like a link. That was something I found kind of neat because the links still work. :) But they don't look like links.

Here is the code:

body { margin: 0; }
a {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
a [href] {text-decoration: none; color: black;}
p {margin-top: 0pt; margin-bottom: 0pt; padding: 0pt; text-indent: 15pt; text-align: justify;}
h1 { text-align: center;}
h2 {text-align: center; }
h3 { text-align: center;}
h4 { text-align: center; }
h5 { text-align: center; }
h6 { text-align: center; }

And here's more information on the Look and Feel section of Calibre.

I've found that converting epub2epub gave me the best results.

I wasn't sure if I was the only one that preferred indents over the space but just in case I thought I should share.

Comments

[amalthia]

My recommendation and I think 99.9% of the people at Mobile Read would recommend this too, is to first convert your PDF to an html file and then edit the html code. PDFs never convert well and you could spend hours and days trying to get one file to look close to what the author originally intended.

I gave up on using Calibre to convert PDFs two years ago. Now if I have no other choice I open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat Professional and save as an html or RTF file. Once you have your paragraphs set in the html it's much easier to get the file to look the way you want.

If you can find the PDF in another format first that would be even better because I'm not going to lie that conversion is going probably not going to be easy to edit. There is a reason I wrote that super long post not too long ago about why I hate PDF and do not like that so many fan fiction authors are sharing fics in that format thinking it's an ebook format.

Blockquote and everything else is generally easier to create in the html file, though I haven't actually used blockquote myself but I know you can use css and create a paragraph tag with an even bigger indent compared to regular paragraphs.

The only person I know that's an expert with PDFs is elfwreck. Though she may also say find the original source file and start from scratch and save yourself the headache/time. But if there is a way to convert that PDF so it looks okay she'd be the one to know how to do it.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.