Calibre - "good" Kindle settings...?

[Anso]

I'm not even sure how to explain my question LOL!

Sometimes I use Calibre to convert books to mobi for my Kindle. Basically I just press convert and have it to output as mobi. But some books turn out very weird when converted...

Somtimes I get ? where there should be ". Quite often I get lots of extra rows inbetween paragraphs. Sometimes an extra blank row in between each text row.

I guess what I'm wondering is if there are any other settings I can change that will help... like if someone has done a walk through of "ideal Kindle settings" for the optimal output in Calibre or something please...? 

Anything like this around? Or are these "formatting faults" something you will just have to accept maybe...

Thanks in advance

[Labrynth]

I've never had good luck converting PDF to MOBI.  I always get wonky formatting.  (Yes, I know I can read PDF on the Kindle but as with the case of the freebies JA Konrath gave us, the font is so small I can barely read it and I always have my Kindle set tot he lowest font size!!)  I had much better luck with RTF files converting to MOBI

[jmiked]

Sometimes it will help if you check the "Transliterate characters...." box in the Look and Feel section of the conversion settings.

I think the problems may stem from using different character sets for generating ebooks. Or something else.

Sometimes I just have to bite the bullet and do a search and replace on stuff like that if it bothers me enough.

If you are converting from PDF, then there isn’t anything you can do to get a good conversion, PDF is just a wretched format.

Mike

[marianneg]

On the " to ? thing, it sounds like your source document is using "smart quotes" (where they tilt a different direction depending on if it's the opening or closing quote).  If you can turn this off in your editing program, or search and replace with regular quotes before converting, this might go away.

[tsemple]

calibre has tons of options for PDF conversion, etc, and the defaults aren't going to work with everything. There are 'good' PDFs, which are tagged to include hints about their structure and order of the parts, which convert well, and 'bad' PDFs, which aren't tagged and don't convert well. If you want it to be perfect when converted to MOBI you need to convert to HTML and edit that. But that's a lot of work and requires specialized knowledge about the HTML dialect that's supported for mobi.

I've sometimes had better results by sending PDFs to Amazon for conversion. I'm trying to learn how to tag PDFs that aren't tagged well (I have Acrobat) but not sure it will be worth the trouble in most cases.

For specific issues, you might go to the mobileread.com 'calibre' forum for help.

[VictoriaP]

Conversion can take some experimenting to get it right.  A few tips:

Under Preferences, look for the Conversion category.  The first tab shown is relevant to the "look and feel" of the final output, regardless of file type.  On that tab, you'll find things like "remove spacing between paragraphs" and "no text justification". This is where you'll want to alter things that affect the document as a whole, regardless of your final file type.

The next tab is Page Setup.  Make sure you've checked Kindle (or Kindle DX, depending on what you have) under Output file.  Under Input file, I usually leave mine as Default.

The next tab after that is Structure.  The only thing I've done here is made sure that the check box for Preprocessing the file is checked.  This does take a bit longer to convert the file, but so far (knock on wood), my files have looked better since I've started doing this.

The next few tabs are for specific file input types, and have many options you can tweak as needed.

The thirteenth tab from the left is for Mobi output.  There are very few options under that one, to date, I've left it alone.

The most recent conversion I did was from PDB to HTML (outside of Calibre), then from HTML to Mobi so I could add it to the Kindle.  When completed, it looked as good as the original, save that I didn't bother to add the cover image back in.  On the other hand, I've stopped converting PDFs for the most part, they're just too troublesome to deal with, and nearly all are at least somewhat readable natively now.

[cloudyvisions]

I've learned that converting an HTML page to MOBI in Calibre works a whole lot better. If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro you can convert any PDF to an HTML file and then just drag it to Calibre and it will format it easily. I think there are also some free programs that can convert from PDF -> HTML if you don't have that.

I usually select in Look and Feel, "remove spacing between paragraphs" and I have "Indent size" at 1.5 em, and then in Structure Detection, I choose "Remove Header," Remove Footer," and "Preprocess input file to possibly improve structure detection." I've found that at least for the things I'm adding, which is mostly fanfiction and older files I have only in PDF, that this works very well.

[Anso]

Thanks - there's been some really useful tips here I'm going to go through my program and change a few settings according to what's been recommended.

Doesn't really help when English is not my first language and for a lot of these setting I don't even know what it means... as in what it actually does (or removes, or changes) to the actual text LOL!

[Lyndl]

This thread was really helpful   I've tweaked a few setting in Calibre and things are looking better.  I have a lot of PDFs that I'm converting... I hate PDF