I recently got hold of a few freebie novels in PDF format. Nice and legal as well
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Anyway - PDF is no good for me so I thought I'd have a go at converting it to epub.
I had many passes at it until I got something almost useful:
- I used a free pdftohtml program which dumped everything into one HTML file.
- I opened the HTML in VIM and then used regular expressions to move all of the headers/page numbers and forced line breaks (except for supposed end of paragraph breaks)
- There were quite a few passages in italics throughout the novel and the initial conversion left a superfluous amount of tags which I used regular expressions to tidy up.
- I opened up the modified HTML in Sigil and then used search and replace to force 5 spaces at the start of each paragraph as the book looks stupid without indenting
- I separated a couple of obvious front pages (foreward etc..) into HTML files so that I could have forced page breaks. Luckily the novel didn't actually have chapters so I didn't have to worry about that.
So by now I had something that was formatted OK. However, I remembered that sometimes conversion from PDF joins words together here and there - particularly in sections with italics. So I copy-pasted the entired text and moved to Word thinking that I would use the Grammar/Spell checker to identify anomalies which I could then tidy up.
This is where everything became unstuck. The grammar and spelling of this author were awful.
I had come quite a long way so I did the best I could to correct some glaring mistakes - but at the end of it I wondered why I bothered. Am I ever going to read a book like this?
I'm certainly not perfect - but if I were writing a novel I'd probably at least run it through a spell checker before publishing it.
Can anyone relate to this?
Have you picked up a free novel only to find yourself staggering under the weight of poor spelling and suspect grammar?
Regards
Caleb