Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
Interestingly, however, all the plain txt us-ascii titles I've downloaded from Gutenburg yesterday ALL display perfectly!
Their Library (on the Reader and on their webpage) should probably be addressed - and very quickly, at that - or there will be some very unhappy customers. Only a few of their txt files display correctly. -- But, as mentioned, the quick solution is to re-download them from Gutenberg.
I'll be downloading more txt files today from Gutenberg, just to make certain that I wasn't "lucky."
Don
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Let’s go a little technical here. Feel free to skip if you are bored. Every time you press “Enter” when you type you insert a “Hard Return” which consists of two invisible characters: “CR” (carriage return) and “LF” (line feed). That will force a new paragraph. You don’t have to do it when you reach the right margin of the screen – you just continue typing, and the text will flow to the new line automatically. Therefore the text will re-flow and properly fill a screen or a page of any width from margin to margin. You need a Hard Return only when you really want your line to break for a new paragraph, or a new line in a dialogue or a verse.
Gutenberg is an old project. Their plain text files are special. Early on they specified their own rules that require
every line to be about 70 characters wide
ending with a Hard Return. Remember old typewriters when you had to hit a lever (CR/LF) every time you reach the right margin? In modern readers and word processors texts with hard returns after 70 letters and double returns for paragraphs don’t look pretty.
So my guess is Ectaco decided to accommodate old Gutenberg files at the expense of all modern texts. Looks like they stripped all single Hard Returns (at the end of lines) to allow the text wrap at the right margin. They left double returns in place to allow correct paragraphs. Good for Gutenberg. Total mess for any normal text you might create in your MS Word. If this is a business decision – it’s a bad decision. If it is a bug – it’s a bad bug.