Help with Calibre

[Masseurhanz]

I need some help from someone that really knows the calibre program.I have seen in another thread that Calibre can fix some of the problems some of the ebooks files have. The post was the all the " ' " were replaced with " ? " so "don't" shows as "don?t" . I have seen some problems like that with a few books I have down loaded, like a capital "C" was replaced with an open parenthasees. I have also had a book or 2 where only a few words, or even worse a few characters, being on each line. The case where it was only a few characters there was no space in between words, it kind of looked like this:
Hieveryb
ody.Hopeev
eryoneishav
agoodtim
eonthesit
e!
I have read here that calibre can fix this but I don't know how or where to look. I looked in the metadata part and didn't see anything about fixing files. Any and all help would be appreciated.

[CeCeSG]

Hi Masseurhanz (hope I spelled that right),
Here's some instructions I used to help with fomatting. It's basically converting the book to PDF and then to E-PUB, and it seems to work no matter what format the book was in when you downloaded it. I havn't found a fix for the character issue (i.e. apostrophes showing up as question marks) Maybe someone else has figured that out. In the mean time, I hope the following helps with the formatting. I know it seems like a lot of steps, but really it takes less than a minute (I just tried to be very detailed.) :)

. In Calibre I first download the metadata, (which the tutorial gives instructions for so I won't include them here.)
2. Then I go to the "Convert E-Books"
3. In the left hand corner for "Output Format" I select TXT
4. In Look and Feel (from menu on the left side of the window) in the "Base Font Size" box I type in 10.0 pt

-Still in Look and Feel I check "insert blank line"
5. In Page Setup (from menu on left) for output and input I select my device (i.e. Kindle, Nook etc.)
6. In Structure Detection (from menu on left) check "insert metadata..." (this will insert a cover and summary of the book before the first page of the book so this is an optional step)
7. At this point I click OK at the bottom right corner of the screen this will convert the book to TXT form. You can look at it and see that the book is now in proper paragraph format.
8. Now go to Convert E-Books again (you need to convert it to the proper format for your reader now)
9. At the top left for Input Format select TXT
10. At the top right for Output Format select the format for your reader (i.e. mobi, epub etc.)
11. In TXT Input (from menu on left) check "Assume print formatting" and "Preserve spaces"
12. Click OK at the bottom right corner of the screen this convert the book to the format for your reader and it should now be ready to download. Once it's done converting I will usually click View to open the Calibre e-reader check out how it formatted.
I know this is a lot of steps, but I wanted to keep it simple for the people out there who are like me and not technically savvy at all. In all it only took a few minutes for each book. I’ve tried this for a few books for my Nook and my Kindle and it worked great on booth. I hope it works for you too!

[Masseurhanz]

Sweet man, thanks for the info Cece. Will be most assuredly be giving this a try. Thanks again.

[Masseurhanz]

Spent several hours doing this bulk to all my books and it didn't work. I also did it to the one book that I know has a messed up page and it didn't work doing it just one at a time either.

[CeCeSG]

Masseurhanz, I'm sorry. This has worked for me to fix a lot of my formatting errors. What kind of e-reader do you have?

[Masseurhanz]

I use a Nook, but all the problems occur on Calibre, ADE and other PC programs as well. I tried using Sigil, which is very good to a point. I still found myself having to delete a lot of extra spaces. I downloaded some other text editors also, going to try them out at work tonight.

[CeCeSG]

When you figure it out please post your solution. You may want to post to your problem on the FB wall or discussion (I saw you on there already :) ) Maybe someone htere has come across a solution. Also try the Nookboards. They offer a lot of tech help too.http://www.nookboards.com/forum/

Sorry I couldn't help.

[Masseurhanz]

Started a thread on those boards and the only response I have gotten so far is that changing the format sometimes helps.

[Masseurhanz]

I was given the suggestion to switch fonts on those boards CeCe, it does work for the less sever mess ups. I put my Nook on light classic with medium font size and it put the paragraphs back together. It didn't work for the more sever mess ups.

[luckbear87]

Yeah I have the same issues and came accross the directions above and didn't have much luck either. Just been sucking it up :P
hope there are some one instuctions

one thing that drives me nuts is all the Sookie Stackhouse books have "Page x of xxx Charlene Harris Dead Until Dark" about every page and a half included in the text. Annoying!

I had one book with the question marks like you said and I posted on the thread that it was loaded on and they fixed it and reposted it for me :)