how do you fix broken senteces in BD?

[buster]

When I convert from doc or rtf in book designer it all comes out with forced sentence endings which doesn't format correctly on the sony reader. There are too many to correct manually is there a way to do it automatically. the element browser detects them but won't do any thing to correct them.

[JSWolf]

Buster, it depends on how the DOC or RTF files are formatted. If you want to PM me a link to one of the problem files, I can take a look.

[buster]

The file is large, and I am not sure what you mean by "PM a link". I am going on holiday soon so I can't spend any time on this now. I will try reformatting in Word before importing into BD. I just thought that if the element browser detected the broken sentences then it could simply delete the line breaks but if it's a more difficult than it seems I don't have time.To fix it manually I delete the spaces between the broken sentences then add a single space, I thought there might be a way to automate this (the same way as a macro in Word).
Thanks for the fast reply.

[JSWolf]

BD cannot tell when a sentence is broken or not. If there are hard returns in the middle of a sentence, then BD won't know they are not supposed to be there. You'll need to preformat and make sure the ends of the lines are correct.

BD cannot tell when
a sentence is broken or not. If there are hard
returns in the middle of a sentence, then BD won't know
they are not supposed to be there.
You'll need to preformat and
make sure the ends of the lines are correct.

The above is broken and BD cannot know how to fix it.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

This often happens when a file isn't properly formatted in the first place, or has been converted from one format to another not-so-compatible one. In many cases, working from the original file removes many of these kinds of problems.

When the original file isn't available, using find-and-replace can work, if you know how it should be formatted... but depending on the app (like Word), find-and-replace don't always work as they should, because Word obscures its formatting codes (even, apparently, to itself). I've occasionally found myself manually fixing entire books this way.

You might try converting the original file to other formats, some of which might make find-and-replace easier. Try converting it to a straight textfile, for instance, to strip out a lot of the extraneous code. If there's not a lot of stuff to put back, i.e., italics, bolds, etc, this can be easiest. Then import that into BD and use its find-and-replace to fix things.

If you know HTML, I've found it easy to import the HTML generated by BD into Dreamweaver (its find-and-replace tools are superior to BD's, IMO), fix the HTML there, then paste it back into BD.

[JSWolf]

You can reveal the formatting in Word to see what it is. But, I do have to say that Wordperfect is better at that.

[Steven Lyle Jordan]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

You can reveal the formatting in Word to see what it is. But, I do have to say that Wordperfect is better at that.

True... but on occasion, the codes revealed by Word don't represent all of the codes in a particular line (or line break), resulting in find-and-replace that skips codes for no visible reason. (I love Word... )

[LaughingVulcan]

To start with, though, you can:

* Open the document in Word
* Hit the Paragraph symbol button (Word's equivalent of Reveal Codes)
* See if there is an easy pattern
* If so, do search-and-replaces (using the "More" and "Special" tabs in the S&R window.)

If, for example, you have two hard returns in between every paragraph, and every line ends in one hard return, the following will work well:

* Replace for every instance of two hard returns (in Word this is called a "paragraph mark" - when using the "Special" button it will appear as "^p" - so the Search box looks like "^p^p".) Replace it with something made up like "=-*-=" is what I do.
* Now that all the paragraphs are "=-*-=", replace all remaining Paragraph marks with a space or a null. (Depends on the file format. Usually I'll replace the para mark with a space.)
* Now replace all instances of "=-*-=" with a paragraph mark plus a tab character.

* If the quotation marks and apostrophes in the text are all straight " and not curly quotes, I'll do an S&R simply replacing quote mark with quote mark (Search:",Replace:") and the same for apostrophes. Word will automatically change them to curly quotes and BD will recognize them.

It's worked for me before, but as above, you have to have some idea of what the format is by using reveal codes (or whatever Word calls that now.) Sometimes there is a Tab character you can lock onto as the search term to differentiate paragraphs. And yep, there are some files where you just have to go in and manually add "paragraphination" since there's no easy way to batch S&R it.

[vvv]

Originally Posted by buster

When I convert from doc or rtf in book designer it all comes out with forced sentence endings which doesn't format correctly on the sony reader. There are too many to correct manually is there a way to do it automatically. the element browser detects them but won't do any thing to correct them.

Try BD -> Settings
re-format completely: checked
keep pictures: checked
keep bookmarks and links: checked
keep styles: checked

Under the above settings BD will try to restore broken sentences.