Help with Text Wrangler?

[Anarel]

Basically, I'm making my own ebooks and have already scanned/ocr'd the files and everything.

I was hoping I could use Text Wrangler or some other kind of text editing software to clean up the text- I just want to indent all the paragraphs and fix all those random line breaks....

Anyone have any tips, or am I way out of my league?

Or is there an easier way to do this?

[kjk]

Text Wrangler is an awesome (and free!) text editor-but are you trying to edit plaintext files? HTML? ePub? Text Wrangler seems more suited to programmers to me, with their for-pay product BBEDIT being more HTML based.

[Anarel]

Originally Posted by kjk

Text Wrangler is an awesome (and free!) text editor-but are you trying to edit plaintext files? HTML? ePub? Text Wrangler seems more suited to programmers to me, with their for-pay product BBEDIT being more HTML based.

Ah, well uhh... .rtf.

I really don't know what I'm doing save that I'm trying to avoid going through the whole book and fixing everything manually.... I thought I could just download it and crash through and see what I could do.... that's usually how I learn things, but I'm guessing it's a bit more difficult than that, ne?

[delphidb96]

Originally Posted by Anarel

Ah, well uhh... .rtf.

I really don't know what I'm doing save that I'm trying to avoid going through the whole book and fixing everything manually.... I thought I could just download it and crash through and see what I could do.... that's usually how I learn things, but I'm guessing it's a bit more difficult than that, ne?

If you've got rtf files, why not shell out the $35 for a full version of Atlantis word processor? It is the next best thing to MS Word for rtf editing (and it will edit txt and Word doc files) and it will even export to html and even ePub.

Derek

[kjk]

Originally Posted by delphidb96

If you've got rtf files, why not shell out the $35 for a full version of Atlantis word processor? It is the next best thing to MS Word for rtf editing (and it will edit txt and Word doc files) and it will even export to html and even ePub.

Derek

If Anarel is using Text Wrangler, he's on a Mac.

Love to see Atlantis ported to OSX, btw.

[Anarel]

Originally Posted by kjk

If Anarel is using Text Wrangler, he's on a Mac.

Love to see Atlantis ported to OSX, btw.

Yup, she's using a mac.

I do have Windows Vista running via Parallels, so if it's any good I could use that on there, though...

[rogue_ronin]

Originally Posted by Anarel

Basically, I'm making my own ebooks and have already scanned/ocr'd the files and everything.

I was hoping I could use Text Wrangler or some other kind of text editing software to clean up the text- I just want to indent all the paragraphs and fix all those random line breaks....

Anyone have any tips, or am I way out of my league?

Or is there an easier way to do this?

What you're probably going to need to learn is regular expressions (sometimes called regex). Once you learn that (and just keep an adventurous spirit: try things!) you should be able to whip things into shape fairly quickly.

They're intimidating. No doubt about it. But it's the tool that you need. I started a small thread here on regex.

There's an old text utility for Windows, called InterParse4, that has a GUI for a lot of basic regex specifically related to ebooks. It's available for download here on MobileRead. Kind of a funky interface, but once you get the hang of it, it can do amazing stuff with text. Note particularly that it wants you to save your changes to a new file, has weird terminology and uses something called "backout" in addition to "undo". Still, it works great. Give it a try in Parallels while you're learning regex.

m a r