(I'm feeling a bit over-whelmed)
What software (other than Caliber) would you guys use to reformat .txt files and put them into a 'universal' format for ebook readers?
Let me explain...
Nerd cred: I am a software engineer with years of perl/unix experience. I'm currently using a Mac to develop Java (and struggling with all the supporting technologies that have sprung up, but I digress).
Since the days when 9600 baud modems were $500 I have been randomly collecting text-based stories from BBS's, usenet, fan fict sites, etc. Think lots of 5-25 meg .txt files.
As a weekend project I have created some perl modules that clean the files up, remove spam, and try to tease out titles, authors, chapters, keycodes, etc.
Then I use multi-edit (a programmers editor with a power full C-like macro language) to run through the files and re-paginate the paragraphs, find rows that end in hyphens and join them, remove more random crap and basically remove formatting.
Then more perl scripts to sort the stories by Title/Author and perhaps de-dup the stories.
For a while I studied XHTML and tried to find a standard DOCTYPE to use tags to mark things up. I looked at Project Gutenberg's styles and liked the Epic-Book-Chapter concepts but it was a very fat schema. I created a few of my own tags and used CSS to control the formatting. It worked on a story-by-story basis but load a 5 meg file with 150 stories into a browser to check things and it gets very, very slow. And I did not realize how important a table of contents was.
(But I had a lot of fun learning).
So my collection builds with no organization or focus.
Last week - (thanks to the enthusiasm in the Sony section of this forum) I bid on several and finally won a Sony 505 from eBay.
In anticipation of the new arrival, I decided to try and re-format some of the 33 megs of .txt files on my hard drive into some semblance of order.
I LOVE all the utilities that people here have written. But many of the postings are 3 years old so this means they are either perfect/tried-and-true, or other tools have supplanted them.
I LOVE Calibre and it will probably be my main management software.
So what is the best way to convert my .txt files into .lrf?
I downloaded
Book Designer 4.0 and pasted in a few stories. It seemed to give me total control over titles, subtitles, authors, but I had to multi-select lines to create paragraphs. This could take hours.
I tried
textify which seemed to join lines into single rows which would solve this problem, but it also put things into a single line that did not belong.
I opened a 7 meg text file in Book Designer and to my surprise it seemed to correctly join rows into paragraphs - When I started to run through the file to mark Title/Author, Author-Text, it crashed out.
Am I frustrated - hell no. This is fun.
Ok - lets assume I take my ... Buffy fan-fiction and break the stories into .txt files by author. There are multiple chapters to one story , and a bunch of short stories. Can I put these all into 1 ebook/.lrf file or am I fighting the model with multiple books in 1? What tools should I use to pre-process the file before Book Designer?