Hi All,

I'm playing around with the Reader and so far it's working great. I'm still playing with the pdf's (they come out small) but the txt and rtf files come out nice and legible.

There's one thing I noticed though that doesn't bother me but I'm just curious about. I'll take a book scan in text format. The formatting looks fine (all the paragraphs and spaces are in the right place) in Word. When I load it onto the Reader the formatting comes out different. This is extremely hard for me to describe so I'll try to demonstate.


Here is a paragrapgh I took from Wikipedia describing Starship Troopers:

The first-person narrative is about a young Filipino soldier named Juan "Johnnie" Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry, a futuristic military unit equipped with powered armor. Rico's military career progresses from recruit to non-commissioned officer and finally to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between mankind and an insectoid species known as "the Bugs." Through Rico's eyes, Heinlein examines moral and philosophical aspects of suffrage, civic virtue, necessity of war, capital punishment, and juvenile delinquency.


If I load it on the Reader it comes out like this:

The first-person narrative is about a young Filipino
soldier named Juan "Johnnie" Rico and his exploits in the Mobile Infantry, a futuristic military unit equipped with powered armor.
Rico's military career progresses from recruit to
non-commissioned officer and finally to officer against the backdrop of an interstellar war between
mankind and an insectoid species known as "the Bugs." Through Rico's eyes, Heinlein examines moral and philosophical aspects of
suffrage, civic virtue, necessity of war, capital punishment, and juvenile delinquency.


See how the sentence gets cut off and goes to the next line all of a sudden? I hope I explained this clear enough. I'm horrible at this. :(


This happens in rtf format as well. Do I have to play around with the Page Layout settings? I know where that is in Word but would anyone know where I can find this in OpenOffice?

Thanks for your time all.

-C

Try these settings

Margins: 0.25" for all
Page size: Custom 5.24" x 6.69"
Font size: 12-16 (Depends on font)

Here is how it looks in Word (and it looks beautiful in Reader)

Do you see the same thing with rtf files made for ebooks (such as the BAEN books in rtf)? Do they have to be processed in Word?

I expect my reader (and dock!) today - I will be curious to see this as many of my books will be BAEN rtf.....

I have not tried any BAEN books yet. Can do that tonight, but by that time you'll probably will get your reader and try it yourself :)

Try these settings

Margins: 0.25" for all
Page size: Custom 5.24" x 6.69"
Font size: 12-16 (Depends on font)

Here is how it looks in Words (and it looks beautiful in Reader)

Thanks Slava! I'll try it when I get home tonight.

:)

This happens in rtf format as well.

-C

Crono,
Does this happen with rtf files you create by typing the text yourself. Sometimes copied text contains "soft returns" at the end of the original lines when you copy text. I know this happens when copying email messages. :scholar:

Crono,
Does this happen with rtf files you create by typing the text yourself. Sometimes copied text contains "soft returns" at the end of the original lines when you copy text. I know this happens when copying email messages. :scholar:


To be honest I have never tried that. I was trying to do all of this this morning before work so I'd have something to read at lunch. :)

I can test this when I get home. Good suggestion!

-C

The formatting is still off for me - I changed the margins on MS Word and saved it as an RTF but the text in the reader still reads thus:

AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD EEEE FFFF GGGG EEEE AAAA
AAAA BBBB
AAAA BBBB CCCC DDDD EEEE FFFF GGGG EEEE AAAA

Any ideas ?

Mohit,

It's the same deal with me as well. Right now it's still readable but I would like to fix this.

I'll continue to play around with the settings and be sure to post once I find a solution.

Thanks, Crono. You're right - it's not as bad as it seems on the LCD screen where it would be unreadable but it would be nice to get a fix eventually !

With a lot of my RTF files I am getting an immediate error from my reader that shows a triangle with exclamation mark inside and the text "Invalid Page!" below it. At that point all the books on the 1GB SD card no longer show up on the reader until I pop the card and put it back. TXT files seem to work fine. Ideas?

With a lot of my RTF files I am getting an immediate error from my reader that shows a triangle with exclamation mark inside and the text "Invalid Page!" below it. At that point all the books on the 1GB SD card no longer show up on the reader until I pop the card and put it back. TXT files seem to work fine. Ideas?

Create a new rtf file from scratch and transfer it to the Reader. Does it open? If so, there's a problem with those files. I had a similar occurrence with an RTF file that had some type of funky formatting on the table of contents page. It would totally lock up the Reader. I had to reset the device in order to use it again. I went back and deleted that page and the rtf worked.

Basically, try to look for any wierd formatting issues. Try changing the file to text and try that as well.

-C

Thanks for the ideas, trying now...

I don't really have anything new to add, just wanted to state that I also am having a lot of formatting issues.

I currently have a bunch of ebooks in .rtf and .txt but a lot of them display all wacky on the Sony.

-Hard return paragraph spacing is not correct or does not exist at all
-Justification is off in some areas
-Word wrap is not working correctly or appearing when it should not
-Page breaks are not occuring in the correct places
-Some text is garbled and or corrupted

:huh:

Doing manual editing of margins and font sizes somewhats alieviates the problem. Although, the dream of just dragging and dropping my existing ebooks onto this device is not a reality. Sigh.. Oh well.

I don't really have anything new to add, just wanted to state that I also am having a lot of formatting issues.

I currently have a bunch of ebooks in .rtf and .txt but a lot of them display all wacky on the Sony.

-Hard return paragraph spacing is not correct or does not exist at all
-Justification is off in some areas
-Word wrap is not working correctly or appearing when it should not
-Page breaks are not occuring in the correct places
-Some text is garbled and or corrupted

:huh:

Doing manual editing of margins and font sizes somewhats alieviates the problem. Although, the dream of just dragging and dropping my existing ebooks onto this device is not a reality. Sigh.. Oh well.



Those are the exact words I was looking for when I tried to describe my problem. I knew I was bad at this. :)

The funny thing is Curry that I have a couple of rtf's that format fine. It's even more confusing because the rtf's that I have been playing with are straight conversions from *.lit files. I thoguht that by starting off on the same ground I could see exactly where the problem was coming from. No dice.

I'm at a loss right now but I'll continue to work at it. The text right now is perfectly readable. I'm amazed at how much faster I can get through a book compared to a standard paperback. Setting this up so the text is formatted correctly every time would be icing on the cake. :)

Thanks for the ideas, trying now...


Did that work for you gbdesai? Just curious.

I

I currently have a bunch of ebooks in .rtf and .txt but a lot of them display all wacky on the Sony.

-Hard return paragraph spacing is not correct or does not exist at all
-Justification is off in some areas
-Word wrap is not working correctly or appearing when it should not
-Page breaks are not occuring in the correct places
-Some text is garbled and or corrupted



Could you save a single page or two of one of these files and upload it for the rest of us to see exactly what you have? It may help trouble shooting. :huh:
:scholar:

And I'll bet that zooming on the device may appear to sort-of help in some cases, but there is still word spacing funkiness.

I find that the Reader does not like DOS-style CR/LF end-of-line markers in text files and renders TXT files in the way you have described. I have tested this using both TXT files written directly to an SD as well as loaded via the Connect software's import feature. You can test by stripping out the CR/LF EOL sequences with a text editor and reloading them onto the Reader.
Perhaps this is due to the Windows-only Connect application and the Linux-based Reader. Whatever the cause, it is irritating.


UPDATE:

So much for my previous CR/LF comments.
As it happens all of my TXT and RTF jaggy line formatting issues are due to hard returns. Some of my RTFs had hard returns after each 'sentence' element, some didn't. Those without render nicely on the Reader. No surprise. Same thing with TXT.
At least for myself, hard-return culling (similar to that used in the macros described earlier in the thread) works like a charm.

If I'm reading your situation correctly this may be of help:

Here's how I prepared Rtf files wrt to jagged end of lines...
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=40958#post40958

It uses MS Word mass replace to get rid of extraneous paragraph marks in the rtf file.

Also you can highlight all the text (in MS Word) and use ctrl-shft > to increase the font size until it's about 18 or 20 and set it to Arial or Times New Roman. And you can choose full justification to get clean margins on both sides.

Use right click and "font" to see what size some particular highlighted text is.

I am pretty happy with the way documents are turning out that way. Haven't decided whether I like a blank line between paragraphs... seems too spacious, but without it, it seems a little crowded. But no big deal either way for me.

The font size of my rtf files are too small for reading comfortably on the Sony reader. I want to set the font size to 18 in multiple rtf files at one instance instead of opening each file and setting the font size one by one, is there a way I can do this? Your help is very much appreciated.

If I'm reading your situation correctly this may be of help:

Here's how I prepared Rtf files wrt to jagged end of lines...
http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?p=40958#post40958

It uses MS Word mass replace to get rid of extraneous paragraph marks in the rtf file.

Also you can highlight all the text (in MS Word) and use ctrl-shft > to increase the font size until it's about 18 or 20 and set it to Arial or Times New Roman. And you can choose full justification to get clean margins on both sides.

Use right click and "font" to see what size some particular highlighted text is.

I am pretty happy with the way documents are turning out that way. Haven't decided whether I like a blank line between paragraphs... seems too spacious, but without it, it seems a little crowded. But no big deal either way for me.


I tried every suggestion in this thread, to no avail.

I tried your "replacing all" in your other thread, but then there are no paragraphs at all. Just a constant stream of text.

Any other ideas on how to fix the line breaks in RTFs? :(

*EDIT*

It really does seem like some .lit files coverted to .rtf behave better than others. Wonder why....? Some of mine are almost perfect, with only a few lines messed up, whereas some are awful.

Also, how do you set the margin sizes correctly? I'd like a little more white-space to the left and right of my text on my .rtfs. I can edit the margin sizes in Microsoft Word, but they're not displayed on the Reader.

*sigh* Thanks guys/girls.

It seems to default to a particular margin size for RTF -- that is, the margin settings in the file don't seem to make a difference.

If you want more margin, the only things that I know of at the moment which allow that are LRF and PDF, both of which have their other drawbacks. :sad2:

I got the margin for the right ok using Book Designer, but no matter what I do, the space between the top of the Reader and the first line remains the same, and I can't seem to adjust the left margin, either.

Gah!

Ah. You'll probably notice a bit more space at the bottom of the screen than you might like. It may be hard-coded, there was some discussion of that early on, and I don't think anyone came up with anything. :sad3:

This formatting thing is driving me nuts. I can't see to get RTFs the way I want them. Grrrrr!!