Getting rid of line breaks with Bookdesigner

[Ned]

Can't seem to get anywhere with the Bookdesigner help so hoping somebody here knows.

All I want to do is convert a basic lit file to prc.
Not bothered about TOC, pictures or anything clever, just make the thing readable in its most basic format on a Cybook.

Bookdesigner seems the easiest way(though I have previously used clit from the command line), so I opened the lit file in it and saw hard line breaks after every few words. I ticked Reformat Completely in Configuration Settings and got the book changed and it seemed to take out all the hard line breaks.

On the Cybook it reads fine, except for line breaks appearing a few times per page where they shouldn't.

Looked at it again in Bookdesigner, and turned on "show nbsp" (no idea what I was doing, just guessing) and it showed four tiny squares at the front of every rogue line break. But they also appear in front of every proper line break too.

Does anyone know what is going on and how to remove the rogue breaks and leave the normal ones?

A screenshot is attached of the LHS of the screen- the big gap is a chapter break which is OK.

[Jellby]

"nbsp" is "nonbreaking space", it seems they are used here for indenting paragraphs, and since every hard linebreak is interpreted as a paragraph, it has added the four spaces at the beggining of each one.

[gwynevans]

You can manually merge paragraphs by selecting them then Alt-P, I think, but you've probably reached the limit of what it can do automatically.

[Ned]

Originally Posted by gwynevans

You can manually merge paragraphs by selecting them then Alt-P, I think, but you've probably reached the limit of what it can do automatically.

Thanks that's what I suspected.

Pity cos I don't want anything fancy, just the text without inappropriate linebreaks and Bookdesigner would have suited that perfectly.

[=X=]

Hi Ned,
If you have MS Word you might want to try BookCreator

It's tool, --a Word template with source/marcors, to facilitate the book creation process.

Download the template file
Double click on the BookCreator.dot file.
Open up the HTML in a browser
Then cut-n-paste it to word. (You can import it but cut-n-paste removes the HTML code)


To remove page breaks in MS Word
Open up the menu "Edit|Replace..." or depress the key sequence <Ctrl>+H
In the "Find What:" text box enter "^M"
In the "Replace With:" text box leave it blank
Depress <Replaice All>

This should fix your problem.

There is a menu option that removes leading white spaces too.


Creating the PRC file.
1) If you have MobiPerl's (html2prc) then you can use the BookCreator macro
2) If you have MobiReader you do not have to do a thing as this program automatically converts word files to PRC files. Just import the file to the library and you have a PRC file.


=X=

[Patricia]

Drop the text into Book Designer. Click on the 'Save as' option. Save as html0. Then open the html0 file. Click on 'edit with word'. Then run Stingo's word macro. Finally, reimport into Book Designer.

This isn't as complicated as it sounds.

[Ned]

Well Patricia that was really easy and very quick, thank you. And thank you Stingo.

Sadly, what it's done is to give me the book with no paragraphs or pagination at all. May be that it's just not a good .lit copy I started with. Can't remember where I got it.

Not important as I have a proper prc copy of Dead Souls anyway, but I was trying to establish the simplest routine I could adopt reliably for the future when I do need to convert a lit book.

[Patricia]

I'm sorry that it didn't work for you, Ned. I think it must have been a lit file directly converted from a .txt if it still had all those irritating manual line breaks.

I've had very little trouble with most lit files. Generally I can just put them into BD, assign chapter titles, click the 'insert' tab and select 'insert TOC' and the book is made. So I think that you can hope for less trouble with most future lit files.

[Pulp]

Did you try to open the htm0-file with a simple editor like wordpad?
If its html nonbreaking spaces they should be shown as &nbsp;
If you run replace &nbsp;&nbsp; with &nbsp; several times you should end up with single spaces instead of several.

If they are only used to intend and not between words you can even try to replace the &nbsp; with nothing to get rid of them all.

[DaleDe]

Originally Posted by Pulp

Did you try to open the htm0-file with a simple editor like wordpad?
If its html nonbreaking spaces they should be shown as &nbsp;
If you run replace &nbsp;&nbsp; with &nbsp; several times you should end up with single spaces instead of several.

If they are only used to intend and not between words you can even try to replace the &nbsp; with nothing to get rid of them all.

It is not the &nbsp; (non-breaking space) that is causing the problem. They would just show a gap between the words. The problem is the extra CR/LF sequence at the end of each line that is causing the problem. That is what must be removed. Then you can attack the nbsp problem which is easily fixed as you point out.

[Madam Broshkina]

I have posted a PRC version of Dead Souls. It has been a while since I created a PRC book so I hope that it turned out ok.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by DaleDe

It is not the &nbsp; (non-breaking space) that is causing the problem. They would just show a gap between the words. The problem is the extra CR/LF sequence at the end of each line that is causing the problem. That is what must be removed. Then you can attack the nbsp problem which is easily fixed as you point out.

But if it starts out as a LIT file, the "underlying" format is HTML, and carriage returns are ignored in HTML - paragraphs are defined purely by "<p>" or "<div>" tags.

I would suggest using "ConvertLIT" to "explode" the LIT file to OEB, and then look at the resulting HTML source to see what's causing the line breaks.

[tompe]

Originally Posted by Ned

Does anyone know what is going on and how to remove the rogue breaks and leave the normal ones?

In lit2mobi in MobiPerl I have added some flags that fix these kind of things. But the flags are kind of hardcoded for the files I needed to convert so they might not work for your file.

[JSWolf]

Ned, Book Designer has a bug that if you load in a text file the paragraphs can become messed up. So if you have a text file you are trying to load in, first load it into Word and then save it as RTF and then load it. The Paragraphs will come out fine. Also if you have to do any editing that involve the line endings, Word will let you and then after you've edited it and saved as RTF, you can load into Book Designer without having your paragraphs messed up.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by Patricia

I'm sorry that it didn't work for you, Ned. I think it must have been a lit file directly converted from a .txt if it still had all those irritating manual line breaks.

Originally Posted by HarryT

But if it starts out as a LIT file, the "underlying" format is HTML, and carriage returns are ignored in HTML - paragraphs are defined purely by "<p>" or "<div>" tags.

I would suggest using "ConvertLIT" to "explode" the LIT file to OEB, and then look at the resulting HTML source to see what's causing the line breaks.

From personal experience, a lot of .txt to .html conversions for inclusion in a .lit file have this problem. So we have Garbage In-GarbageOut and reconversions become problematic!

Basically, the original CR/LF line endings in the .txt file were mindlessly just converted to <br>, and thus any attempt to salvage this situation using the exploded .html from a .lit should address this issue.

In a text editior, open the .html and search and replace all: <br>\n with a "space" or just nothing
[i.e. search for <br> followed by a newline character and replace with a space or nothing (whichever works better). Note: sometimes the newline may not exist, so search without it, in those cases]