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I have just finished the long and arduous task of typesetting a book using quarkXpress2015. While everything is beautiful on-screen and as a PDF, things get ugly when exporting as ePub for ebooks. I've been at it for a few days, going between quark and Calibre and editing the html and such to try to get it to look as beautiful on ereaders. When I open it on an ipad using ibooks it looks fair, but there is one annoying problem I can't seem to fix. The paragraphs don't break. So if I have a long paragraph that wouldn't fit entirely onto the end of one page, it'll push the whole paragraph to the next page, leaving a huge gap on the previous page. If anyone can point me in the right direction I would appreciate it!

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  • Some screenshots would be helpful.
    – Glorifind
    Nov 12, 2015 at 8:08
  • I'm thinking it has something to do with how the paragraphs are set up in the html. Is there a tag I can use to let ibooks know to break the paragraphs? Here is what each paragraph is currently surrounded by: <div id="box3_20" class="para1"><span class="text4"> MY TEXT HERE </span></div>
    – Ted
    Nov 12, 2015 at 13:12
  • "everything is beautiful on-screen" - what do yo mean? Maybe quarkXpress2015 can export your book in a format friendlier to e-book readers? PDF is the worst format for pretty much everything, except for printing and reading on screen. Ideally, it can export in xhtml - from it, Calibre can generate ebooks without a problem.
    – virolino
    Dec 15, 2022 at 6:39

2 Answers 2

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It seems that the first thing you need to do is to start learning HTML.

I'm thinking it has something to do with how the paragraphs are set up in the html."

In your example, you do not use paragraphs at all. So your question is not really about paragraphs and HTML. Why do you use "div" and "span" and not use "<p> ... </p>" according to its intended purpose? Why do you need to re-define HTML? After you use "<p> ... </p>", you can change its appearance with CSS.

"div" and "span" have their purpose too, if used correctly, but they were not created to handle paragraphs.

Your example should look like:

<p> text </p>

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Are there paragraph tags in your HTML? <p> to begin and </p> to end are needed for ebooks. I corrected these for a customer recently who had exported epub from QX.

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  • I have tried that actually. But I added the tags before and after <div> and </div>. Should I remove <div> and <span> tags and just do <p>?
    – Ted
    Nov 18, 2015 at 15:12
  • @Ted: I already asked in my answer: if you want paragraphs, why do you insist to use div and span? If there is a purpose for them, please explain that purpose, so we can provide the most suitable answers to you.
    – virolino
    Dec 15, 2022 at 6:36

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