[vivaldirules]

When I convert a book using BD, I have four persistent problems of which three consume a lot of my time and one is just an annoyance:

1. Often when I start with an HTML from PG, the transcriber has gone to so much effort that they've included the page numbers which appear sprinkled throughout the text as something like [Pg 256]. I dutifully remove these in BD using the find/replace function, enter [Pg and press F3 to march through the text and find these critters. But to remove them, I have to manually click on each one and delete them one at a time. It would be great to automate this but I haven't figured out how since the page numbers obviously change from one to the next. The last book I did today had over 500 pages and so this is quite tedious.

2. I really like to have a blank line after each paragraph. I know some people find this wasted white space, but I find it much easier to read ebooks that have them. Unfortunately, if the text I start with has such lines, BD very reliably removes them for me (it's a "feature"!). I have not found an option to select that would prevent that from happening. Nor have I found a way to use find/replace or something else to automate adding these back in. So I mindlessly scroll through the text, find the end of each paragraph, and manually click Enter after each one.

Do you understand, yet, why it takes me a couple of hours to convert each book?

3. Creating a linkable table of contents is a real chore and I'm sure it is everyone else. First, go to Element Browser and convert all of the Titles and Subtitles to Paragraphs. Then manually scroll through and create manual page breaks before the beginning of each chapter (but be sure to leave at least one blank line between the break and the chapter heading or the TOC in the LRF file you create won't work). Then create the TOC by manually copying the chapter headings to the Contents. Then highlight the headings and make them Titles, center the chapter subheadings, add the chapter headings that are now Titles to the list of Notes, and for each of these Notes create a link in the TOC. If there are five chapters, this is fine, but if there are 35 like the one I did today, be prepared for spending some real time - just to create a TOC!

4. Lastly, I have language issues (Arf!). I know that the BD settings let me choose a language which, if I pick the right one, should let me create ebooks that display diacritical marks correctly. But often I find that my ebooks contain Cyrillic letters and I'm wondering if I need to set the language in BD before I load a new book and immediately create a test ebook to see if the language I've chosen is correct. Or can I change the language later? Maybe I'm not doing this properly. Yesterday, I posted a The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî which I could not get BD to create with any diacritical marks correctly. That was really frustrating since there are many throughout the book.

Oh, yes. And then there's the "epic paragraph" (as our Good Master RWood mentioned). I had one of those for the first time yesterday. I got to a point where if I did anything else in BD (even add a Book Author, picture, etc.) all of the formatting was lost and my epic paragraph was created. I was stuck with having to Undo and create the ebook as it was or else start from the beginning. Go figure.

If anyone has suggestions for ways to help me tackle these problems, I would appreciate hearing from you. If these are mentioned in posts elsewhere, I would appreciate being pointed to them. Thanks. Now, how about we try wrestling some crocodiles?