[tex4ht] Fwd: Getting rid of <span class="cmr-9"> breaks in footnotes

[Jürgen Hubert]

> Gesendet: Freitag, 03. Juli 2020 um 20:46 Uhr
> Von: "Michal Hoftich" <michal.h21 at gmail.com>

> These <span> elements are inserted by HT Fonts. You can suppress them,
> but it is then necessary to provide configurations that insert HTML tags
> for \textit, \textbf and similar commands. Fortunately, it is possible
> to do that using the "fonts" option, so you don't need to configure them
> yourself. So it is necessary just to configure footnotes to ignore HT
> Fonts.
> 
> Try the following .cfg file:
> 
> \Preamble{xhtml,fonts}
> \Configure{footnote-text}
>     {\HPage{}\HCode{<div class="footnote-text">}\par\NoFonts}
>     {\ifvmode \IgnorePar\fi \EndP
>      \EndNoFonts\HCode{</div>}\EndHPage{}}
> \Css{.footnote-text{font-size:0.9em;}}
> \begin{document}
> \EndPreamble
> 
> It is a direct copy from html4.4ht, I've just added the \NoFonts and
> \EndNoFonts commands, so no <span> elements will be used in the footnote
> text.

Thank you for the quick reply! I tried it out, and the HTML code was indeed cleaned up:

-----
     <div class="footnote-text"> 
    <!--l. 15--><p class="indent" >   <span class="footnote-mark"><a 
 id="fn5x1"><sup class="textsuperscript"><a 
href="EPUBSCEPch1.html#x6-5037r7">5</a> </sup></a></span>Yes, the German text explicitly says that the curly hair is from his head. This may be a story about the
     Devil, but it still should be suitable for <span class="textit">children</span>.</p></div>
-----

Unfortunately, the problem persisted even after this change. I investigated further by manually editing the EPUB file with Calibre, and it turns out that the problem wasn't actually the </span><span> tags - it was the line break between "the" and "Devil". The empty spaces _also_ seem to be displayed in the popup.

Yes, Amazon - one of the biggest companies in the world with massive amounts of IT resources - is unable to interpret HTML correctly with their "popup footnote" feature.

<headdesk>

So, uhm, do you see any way of eliminating this line break and the unnecessary empty spaces while compiling the EPUB file?

Otherwise I will just have to resign myself to either trying to fix this via half-remembered Unix regex commands (wince) or fixing my footnotes manually (double wince). It will be a chore, but it won't prevent publication...

Best regards,

- Jürgen