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Old 06-03-2007, 11:56 PM   #1
Raventhon
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Quick Reformatting of Terrible E-Books

I've been thinking, and as I don't actually know perl myself I'm unable to write the script for it, but a script that did the following would be amazingly useful in formatting eBooks for viewing on mobile devices.

Scan all files in a directory (and subdirectories, hey, why not) and replace all instances of <newline> not immediately followed by either <newline> or <tab> with a single space.

Reasoning behind this: I've seen entirely too many eBooks formatted such that they use manual line breaks instead of using the word wrap feature, and when transferred to a mobile device, you end up with fragmented lines:

"This is a bunch of text serving as example of
incorrect word
wrap due to stupid formatting of eBooks. I really
wish there was
some way to fix it, because it's almost impossible
to read this
terribly formatted text."

Can anyone think of any files they have that this command would damage? I wouldn't want to run it on poetry, but other than that, it seems that this script can be safely run on normally-formatted eBooks without changing anything.
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Old 06-04-2007, 12:00 AM   #2
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Note to self: Check previous posts before making new post. Your question may already have been discussed.
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Old 06-04-2007, 12:15 AM   #3
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Previous threads on scripting

Sometimes it is hard to know what to search for. I am familiar with this thread and this one too that discuss scripting and handling the text-formatting problem that concerns you.

I hope this helps.
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Old 06-05-2007, 11:46 AM   #4
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WYSIWG Editor is broken

Last edited by JSWolf; 06-05-2007 at 11:49 AM. Reason: WYSIWG Editor is broken
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Old 06-05-2007, 11:48 AM   #5
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Raventhon View Post
I've been thinking, and as I don't actually know perl myself I'm unable to write the script for it, but a script that did the following would be amazingly useful in formatting eBooks for viewing on mobile devices.

Scan all files in a directory (and subdirectories, hey, why not) and replace all instances of <newline> not immediately followed by either <newline> or <tab> with a single space.

Reasoning behind this: I've seen entirely too many eBooks formatted such that they use manual line breaks instead of using the word wrap feature, and when transferred to a mobile device, you end up with fragmented lines:

"This is a bunch of text serving as example of
incorrect word
wrap due to stupid formatting of eBooks. I really
wish there was
some way to fix it, because it's almost impossible
to read this
terribly formatted text."

Can anyone think of any files they have that this command would damage? I wouldn't want to run it on poetry, but other than that, it seems that this script can be safely run on normally-formatted eBooks without changing anything.
Are you talking about purchased, "downloaded", or books from sites like Project Gutenberg?
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Old 06-21-2007, 11:13 AM   #6
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With Project Gutenberg books in text file format, I just paste them into a word document, then run Stingo's Macro. This only takes a couple of minutes and solves the hard carriage breaks.
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Old 06-21-2007, 02:59 PM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Patricia View Post
With Project Gutenberg books in text file format, I just paste them into a word document, then run Stingo's Macro. This only takes a couple of minutes and solves the hard carriage breaks.
If there is an HTML version available, I go for that one. You'll get images if there are any, and italics. Its not hard to work with the HTML in Book Designer. if you use the text file instead, you lose what attributes and images there might be. So please use the HTML when one exists.
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Old 06-21-2007, 04:46 PM   #8
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Stingo's macro just looks for double paragraph marks, doesn't it? Won't help if you have a file that doesn't have an extra line between paragraphs (as often happens with files that have been through a PDF stage somewhere in their history). I've been thinking of writing a perl script to make a "best guess" based on line length. I'll be doing some perl work this summer, and may have a chance to slip it in then. I'll post it somewhere on mobileread (in the wiki, maybe) if I get a reasonable version working.
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Old 06-21-2007, 08:47 PM   #9
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With the HTML from PG, there is no need to have to reformat it to remove the extra line spaces. It works just fine in BD as is. And if there are line spaces, they are meant to be there.
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Old 06-21-2007, 11:22 PM   #10
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When designing scripts to deal with hard carriage returns, it is good to be able to actually see which character codes are causing the problem. A programmer's editor is the tool to start with for your basic research. You can read more here.
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Old 06-22-2007, 08:32 AM   #11
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If you deal with pre-formatting PG books, also check out their faq which provides some useful tips.

Quote:
There are some applications that specifically assist with auto-converting text into HTML:

* GutenMark http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark was specifically written for the purpose, and knows enough about PG conventions to do a very good job.

* InterParse http://www.interparse.com is a Windows-based generic text parser that is very easy and intuitive to use.

* The World Wide Web Consortium lists some other options at http://www.w3.org/Tools/Misc_filters.html
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Old 06-22-2007, 11:17 AM   #12
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Dealing with ugly line spacing

Let me give an example:
My favorite file format for the Reader is plain old ASCII text. The title on the Reader turns out to be the same as the filename. I like that. I can make text files from many other formats. The middle font size on the Reader is right for normal reading and then I can go one bigger if the lighting is bad. I don't have to experiment a lot when I am in a hurry to read something.

So I got a book in lit format and converted it to lrf. The resultant line formatting was just plain ugly. There were sentence fragments everywhere and way too many spaces between lines. I decided to tighten it up.

I used Amber lit converter (abclit) to convert the original lit file to text. Then I opened the file in PSPad (see earlier post for source). I used the hex display mode to examine the character structure of the ugliness. I noticed that there were $0d$0a pairs everywhere. That is a carriage return line feed combination.

But at the beginning of every real paragraph there was an $a0 character. That is a space character with the high order bit set, I don't know why anybody put that character in there. It is not common. But I liked it because it gave me a way to reformat everything easily.

First I used search and replace to find all the $0d$0a pairs and replace them with $20 (space). Then I replaced all the $a0 characters with $0d$0a pairs. The result was pure beauty! The paragraphs all flowed well and there were no unwanted line spaces.

It took five minutes!

Last edited by mogui; 06-22-2007 at 11:20 AM.
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Old 06-22-2007, 11:39 AM   #13
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While MS Word (and OpenOffice) are nice tools for documents, nothing beats Ultra Edit for major work on raw text files. I use it frequently when preparing the Harvard Classics series of books. It is a commercial product; but, for me it has been worth it.
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Old 08-03-2007, 10:20 PM   #14
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Quote:
eBooks formatted such that they use manual line breaks instead of using the word wrap feature, and when transferred to a mobile device, you end up with fragmented lines
I use a freeware program called 'E-book Tidy' that fixes this. I use it for all my Gutenberg texts. It does more besides:

Quote:
Join Lines
Join Quotes
Split Lines at Page Width
Remove Blank Lines
Remove Extra Blank Lines
Add Carriage Return after Paragraph.
Trim Right Spaces
Indent Paragraphs
Unindent Paragraphs
Remove Numeric only lines
Delete initial numeric
Delete trailing numeric
Convert extended Ascii
Remove Extra Spaces
To Uppercase
To Lowercase
To Sentence Case
Invert Case
Convert Single to Double Quotes
Spell Check the document
It's available here:
http://www.simtel.net/product.php%5B...t_page%5D76296
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Old 08-03-2007, 11:15 PM   #15
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Quote:
Originally Posted by RWood View Post
While MS Word (and OpenOffice) are nice tools for documents, nothing beats Ultra Edit for major work on raw text files. I use it frequently when preparing the Harvard Classics series of books. It is a commercial product; but, for me it has been worth it.
What can Ultra Edit do that Word cannot or what can Ultra Edit do better?

I've been thinking of trying to find a better text editor then Notepad.
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