Calibre: Remove Paragraph Spacing, Not Indent Formatting

There is an easy way to remove the extra paragraph spacing that Calibre (an eBook converter) automatically inserts into your manuscript, without having to disrupt your indent formatting to do so.

Jump to the solution, or continue reading for the explanation

Calibre, in case you are unaware, automatically inserts a blank line after each paragraph in your book. While it does provide a way to turn off this feature (Under “Look and Feel” when you’re converting your eBook, there is a box titled “Removing spacing between paragraphs” — clicking this box with remove the extra spacing), Calibre automatically deletes your custom indention and assigns all of your paragraphs a default indent (“Indent Size”) of 1.5 em. While it is possible to change the size of this default indent, it is not possible to regain your original custom indenting.

For some, this is not a problem. If all your paragraphs have the same indent, then all you have to do is set the default indent to the value you want. If, however, some of your paragraphs are indented whereas others are not, this uniformity is not to be desired.

To fix this, instead of checking the box titled “Removing spacing between paragraphs,” add the following code to “Extra CSS” (also located in “Look and Feel”):

p, div {
    margin-top: 0px;
    margin-bottom: 0px;
}

This will successfully remove Calibre’s blank lines without affecting your indents. Good luck!

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