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Old 02-15-2010, 11:39 AM   #1
dragonscales
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Editing with Book Designer - joining paragraphs

Hi everyone.
I have been using Book Designer for a little over a year and absolutely love it. However, I am one of those people who don't really use it to it's full potential and I more than likely have missed out on many of it's features. I use the BRUTE FORCE method of editing.
This means it can take me literally hours to convert a PDF to an LRF.

I am wondering if there is an easier way to clean up broken paragraphs. By this I mean:
1. I have opened a PDF in BD.
2. manually waded thru the book and deleted the chapter numbers, author name and book title that can be found at the top of each of the pages of the book (all hundreds of them). (if it's clean enough I use find/replace, but this can't be done for page numbers)
3. Now I'm left with a sentence that is broken where it was cut off at the bottom of one page and continues at the top of the next so there can be spaces between them where I deleted the page number.

I have been manually selecting the whole paragraph(including the spaces) and clicking on PARAGRAPH in the BD Corrector. This joins them into one paragraph or sentence.

Is there an easier method? I just downloaded Book Cleaner BC18 and installed thinking it may help, but i didn't notice a difference.

I am prepared to continue doing what I have been doing for the last year, but frankly, I'm getting a little tired of it. LOL
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
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Old 02-15-2010, 12:01 PM   #2
HarryT
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dragonscales View Post
2. manually waded thru the book and deleted the chapter numbers, author name and book title that can be found at the top of each of the pages of the book (all hundreds of them). (if it's clean enough I use find/replace, but this can't be done for page numbers)
Sure it can. You need to learn how to use regular expressions. On the search and replace dialog, check the "regex" box. Then, if your page numbers are of the form, say:

[Pg nnn]

then enter a search string of

\[Pg [0-9]*\]

and leave the replacement string empty.

Do a "replace all", and all your page numbers will be disappeared.
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Old 02-15-2010, 12:02 PM   #3
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Oh WOW!!

going to try that now.
thanks!!
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Old 02-15-2010, 04:30 PM   #4
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You can speed up paragraph joins by regex as well. Two searches I use are

1) hard return followed by a lowercase letter. This catches broken sentences
- replace with a space and found letter
2) any letter (upper/lower) followed by a hard return. This catches sentences that don't end with . " ?, etc and are likely broken.
- replace with found letter and space

I wouldn't a replace all unless you're very confident (things like quotations or poetry will get caught when you don't want them) but you can step through quickly.
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Old 02-15-2010, 08:46 PM   #5
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Thanks, I'll try that too. Not having much luck with the page numbering, but i'm sure it's ME!! I'll keep plugging away at it.

thanks again.

edited: so, for point two above, would I enter :

\[a-z]\r

where \ means the next character is a special character, then [a-z] is the range a to z and \r means a carriage return?
To be read as "look for any character A to Z that is followed by a carriage return" and that should hopefully find a hard return in the middle of a sentence? I tried that and it doesn't work. I'll keep fooling around with it. It must be obvious I don't know what i'm doing.

If i can't figure it out, it's ok. I'll go back to my old way of reading thru the book and find the broken paragraphs.

Thanks for trying to help!!

Last edited by dragonscales; 02-15-2010 at 08:57 PM.
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Old 02-15-2010, 10:00 PM   #6
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I use MS Word so someone might be able to help better with BD's regex implementation. I admit I'm not very good with regex just some simple things but it's very powerful once you master it. Page numbers are just trying to find a pattern. it there isn't one that won't conflict with the numbers in the book you have a harder time. But it can be used to step through faster than scrolling.

You can also look out for font types or size changes and catch them that way - at least in Word I can not sure about BD. ie. It might have been a footer than now is in the main text but it is still 10pt instead 12pt and I'll just replace all 10pt font with a blank.

It's best to just try simple queries until you are confident it's doing what you think. In my examples in MS Word it uses ^13 for a return instead of \n or \r

^13([a-z])

The items in parenthesis become a variable you can use in the replace line. So the replace like would be " \1" without the quotes to add a space instead of a carriage return and then replace the first found letter back - you can have multiple variables per find line. This would attach a line like

The quick brown fox jumped over
the lazy dog.


The second example would be

([a-zA-Z])^13

which I would use "\1 " without the quotes as the replace line.

This would find:

Mark sat on the bench and asked
Tony what the time was.
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Old 02-16-2010, 08:44 AM   #7
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What form are the numbers in in the book you're currently looking at, dragonscales? If you can give an example of one, I'll be happy to help you out with what search expression you need.
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Old 02-17-2010, 01:53 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dragonscales View Post
Any suggestions would be gratefully received.
If you own a copy of MS Word I recommend you use Stingo's Macro or BookCreator. BookCreator uses Stingo's Word Wrap Marco and also developed a faster and more reliable word wrap solution.

You can use BC to format your book then import it to BD or if you have calibre you can create your book from BookCreator

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