|
[QUOTE=frabjous;862441]You did each line of the entire book by hand?
No, it was mainly every line beginning with a tab and every line beginning with quotation marks. I could not figure out how to get rid of the tabs using Find/Replace on OpenOffice; I tried "^t" and it did not recognize it. I tried hitting the tab key in the find space and it didn't like that, either. Once I got rid of all the tabs I used a paragraph command to indent the first line of each paragraph using a ruler, but there was no command to exempt lines beginning with quotation marks, which are traditionally not indented, so I had to de-indent those lines by hand. it took less than an hour, actually.
"Surely you could have used one find and replace to remove the tabs (either in AbiWord or OpenOffice, or in the output file). And you could use styles to indent/de-indent paragraphs. How hard this would be would depend on whether the .doc file used styles, or there is some other easy way for a computer to determine which lines should be indented and which not. (I didn't really understand what you meant by lines of dialogue nor why they should be treated differently than other paragraphs.) If so, it should have been possible to do it in either one easily enough."
The source document was written in OpenOffice and saved as a .doc file. I generally don't use styles (though I probably will now!). In case you haven't guessed, I'm not a text-editor chick, and I don't know HTML. My software engineer husband keeps telling me to learn them, but I find them very difficult.
|