How to make text "darker" and a bit smaller in conversions to LRF?

[Teddman]

I've noticed in professional LRF e-books and community-created books such as HarryT's Sherlock Holmes omnibus, the text seems to be a bit smaller and darker than what I get on my average conversion to LRF using Calibre.

When converting .lit and rtf to lrf in Calibre, I just leave all the defaults as is. This usually results in a nicely formatted book, but one where the text is a bit "thin" and faint compared to what I was describing above.

Is there any way to enable this look easily via Calibre upon conversion, or by using a text editor? I don't have access to Book Designer (Mac user), and I don't believe what I'm talking about requires font embedding...

[John F]

I'm no expert with Calibre, but here is what I do. I'm using Calibre version 0.5.10.

In the Override CSS, I put the following:

p {line-height:2.5}
body{font-family: sans-serif} p{font-family: sans-serif}

I set "Base font size" to 10.5

For EPub, the fonts sometimes don't come out as a like, so in stylesheet.css, I'll do a global replace of "serif" with "sans-serif".

Good luck.

[Teddman]

Thanks for the advice. I would prefer to stick with a serif font if possible though... I guess there's no easy way to get the slightly smaller, darker text that Harry gets for his books via Book Designer?

EDIT: So it turned out that the obvious fix was to simply bold all text in the source file. So say if you have an rtf ebook, open it in a text editor, select all, bold it, and then save it. You can then convert to lrf and the book will display bold on the reader.

I'm not sure if this would work on a .lit or other source file where it isn't as easy to bold the text in a regular text editor.