Newbie trying to correctly format ebook with open office

[gargoyle67]

I've got a txt ebook but I'm trying to use template to make the book more bebook friendly (thinner boarders) but I can't seem to format out the word\space gaps that it has in the book, I'm I supposed to ajust this under the format section under paragraph ? or the character format section or both ?I'm using open office btw, I copy and then paste straight into OpenOffice 3.
This is what it looks like on the 2nd zoom level:


And this is one I managed to get that just worked when I cut and pasted it into my open office 3 template, Also zoom level 2, note the slim boarders:

[HarryT]

The word is "borders", not "boarders" . "Boarders" means something entirely different.

The problem you have in your initial screenshot is a hard line break at the end of each line. There are a number of tools that you can use to sort this out; I use a little freeware command-line tool called "textify" which I've attached to this message.

[gargoyle67]

Thanks Harry, For both lessons

[pdurrant]

I wouldn't thank anyone for giving me lesions. Lessons, perhaps. :-)

Originally Posted by gargoyle67

Thanks Harry, For both lesions

[gargoyle67]

Check again
I woz in a rooosh

[pilotbob]

Originally Posted by HarryT

The word is "borders", not "boarders" . "Boarders" means something entirely different.

Maybe he doesn't have enough food in his bebook and he needs smaller boarders.

BOb

[gargoyle67]

You must have plenty of food pilotbob with all your spam

[Valloric]

Originally Posted by gargoyle67

You must have plenty of food pilotbob with all your spam

[Jill75]

The hard line breaks does not only appear in this bebook but in some documents that I encounter and when I try copy pasting it in word. This I seem is due to differences in formating of different programs. Some people are not really well versed in the use of English. Maybe gargoyl has weakness in English but its up to us who knows better.

Thanks Harry for this tip which I sometimes encounter.

[gargoyle67]

Originally Posted by Jill75

The hard line breaks does not only appear in this bebook but in some documents that I encounter and when I try copy pasting it in word. This I seem is due to differences in formating of different programs. Some people are not really well versed in the use of English. Maybe gargoyl has weakness in English but its up to us who knows better.

Thanks Harry for this tip which I sometimes encounter.

Or gargoyle even, maybe you need some english lessons ?

[roger64]

I give you my way with OpenOffice 3 (Linux and Windows, Mac to try)
You just open your Gutenberg text file with OpenOffice writer.

Two steps using "Search and replace with regular expressions"
If need be you can easily make a macro to join them.

"$" with " " put a space between the last two brackets
to get rid of hard returns and then
".*$" with "&\n"
to create again paragraph breaks (yes that's point star dollar)

Save.

After that I insert the "purified" text into a special 9x12 cm model and that's it.

[mtravellerh]

Originally Posted by roger64

I give you my way with OpenOffice 3 (Linux and Windows, Mac to try)
You just open your Gutenberg text file with OpenOffice writer.

Two steps using "Search and replace with regular expressions"
If need be you can easily make a macro to join them.

"$" with " "
to get rid of hard returns and then
".*$" with "&\n"
to create again paragraph breaks (yes that's point star dollar)

Save.

After that I insert the "purified" text into a special 9x12 cm model and that's it.

Hmm. Sounds good. Two things jump to the eye, though:
1 What about ! and ??
2 What about titles that don't end with a .?

[roger64]

I have had quite good and readable results with this and that's why I posted it. Sometimes, a little cleaning for the headers of the book is requested because they may have a slightly different formatting than the rest of the text. But Gutenberg's are OK for my experience.

Well, just try it and let me know if we can improve something. It's free.

Let me give you an easy example here so that you can check the results by yourself: I uploaded here the shortest book from Gutenberg Australia I could find (Collected stories 23 k) and the output using the recommended method above. (Cleaned collected stories 68k) as a rtf file.

First step : 444 occurences removed
Second step : 149 occurences added (paragraph breaks)
After that I inserted in my 9x12 cm model and saved as a rtf file.

Please note that for the first step, I changed $ with a space.

To finish with it, you can make a macro with these two steps (choose Tool Register macro) and it's quite handy and quick.

[roger64]

I tried Textify.exe

The output is about exactly the same as the output of the OpenOffice method.
Good news for me, it's working with Linux if you use Wine
You have to enter some statements about the kind of file to process.

The OpenOffice way is however much quicker because a dedicated macro can lead you directly to your own-formatted 9x12 cm book. However, it's a one trick macro and good only for Gutenberg kind of books.

I will keep both.

don't forget
Before entering the books in the Reader, you need to find a suitable format. I usually export my OpenOffice fileas a PDF , edit the meta-data with PDF Info and directly copy on the Reader.