If I delete the </par> command between lines 1 and 2 and 2 and 3 and save the document, Sigil immediately adds them back in.
I deleted them with another program and opened the new ePub in both Adobe Digital Editions and iBooks, no change.
Hoever, I then reopened the altered file in Sigil and the <p> commands have returned.
This is a vey deep rabbit hole indeed.
Honestly, at this point I would suggest going back to the top and following the instructions to the letter on a fresh test. There is no deep rabbit hole, but rather two very simple techniques that both need to be applied together. In all of your posts you seem to be choosing one or other but never both together, and thus never get the desired result. The concept is simple: you need to use Markdown to indicate multi-line blocks. Your settings strip out all Markdown. You thus need to also use a tool to tell the compiler to avoid stripping out Markdown.
I never recommended editing the output in Sigil. That’s unnecessary busy-work.
Thank you. This document started out as a LaTeX document, which Pandoc could only partially de-LaTeXify. My first thought was to add Markdown elements as I went through the rest of the text.
Somewhere along the way you pointed out the Scrivener=>Pandoc=>ePub option, which gave me an excellent ToC, which is important because in this text, the ToC is perhaps the most important element. The only bad feature was that the ## headers remained in the ToC when compiled, and some header text was marked as header text and some wasn’t, giving me an inconsistent ToC. The *_* to mark italics also had to be removed because they did not italicize the text. All of these were removed as well. So whatever I’m left with compiles rich text but recognizes some html commands but when I followed the advice to create single-spaced text, nothing worked.
I probably went through in excess of 25 compiles–maybe more–to fix this but nothing worked. Unfortunately, compile through Pandoc is kind of a black box where I can’t tell what it will do next. So I will live with the double spaced text. If I were starting a brand-new document, perhaps there would be a way to fix this, but the nature of this text is that I don’t have the liberty to make the revisions were it a completely original work–about half of it is typesetting, for which LaTeX is perfect. The new version of Sigil, I found out today, has a setting where it does not automatically “fix” changes made upon exit. So I tried again, but same result.
Throughout all of this you have been very helpful and I thank you again. The .ePub format isn’t the greatest format and ultimately is in the hands of the reader’s chosen software and there is nothing to be done about that.