Quote:
Originally Posted by cmbs
As I said, I suspect we have a different definition of hand formatting. You can run ten books a day through software and spit out the results and post them online. You can even call it hand formatting. I don't call that hand formatting. It is of course no different from what Manybooks.net does, only they have over 23,000 separate books in a lot of file types. That's different file types for each and every book counting as one book. And their mobi files (which is what I read) don't have pre-determined settings which deprive me of choosing my own.
It's not humanly possible to hand format ten books per day if you're actually hand formatting them. Which involves reading them, selectively formatting the text, creating one or more tables of contents, possibly linking to and from footnotes, reading the book and checking for and fixing errors.
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I'm not sure what you mean by "hand formatting." Adding a hard return manually after every paragraph break? Why bother; we have find & replace for that.
I don't mean "run it through some macros & throw the result in a converter."
I mean, look at the source text. Decide which macros are appropriate (for example, removing the hard returns after every line in a Gutenberg text). Scroll through the text, looking for chapter or other section breaks; mark as appropriate. If you find a pattern (e.g., they all start with the word "CHAPTER"), you might be able use Find-Replace or a macro to format them; otherwise, you do so manually.
Normalize all the text--make them all single-spaced paragraphs (or double if that's easier to work on), 100% sized text, not expanded or contracted. This is not necessary if coming from Gutenberg, but other sources, esp. converted from PDFs, might have problems.
Set up Word styles (or whatever your editing program has), so that each application of "Centered-bold-2pts larger font-marked for chapter break" takes only a couple of keystrokes or mouse clicks, instead of right-click, select text, scroll to font, type in size, scroll to bold, enter; right-click, select paragraph, select centered, add 12 pts before and 6 pts after, or whatever.
Format main body text. Choose how to indent, whether to be left-oriented or justified; apply by style instead of clicking on each paragraph individually.
Decide how to deal with links and footnotes, if any. For novels, there often aren't. Build a TOC--if you've formatted your chapter breaks, this can be done automatically. Simple formatted texts might be done in as little as half an hour. Most books, 1 1/2 to 3 hours each, depending on things like tables, poetry and other troublesome formatting features. Poorly-formatted originals would take longer.
However, as mentioned, people may upload 10 in a day because they *finished* all ten of those in a day, not because the start-to-finish process was done in less than 8 hours.