BookDesigner vs Crocodile Wrestling

[vivaldirules]

That's terrific information, Patricia! Thank you. I apologize if it's all known to everyone else and has already been posted five times before. Much karma upon you.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Check that your BD settings allow the empty lines to be kept (Configuration/settings/keep empty lines)

Well, like.....duh! Must find new glasses/brain.

[Patricia]

I'm off on holiday on Monday morning, till the 15th July, but will have a go when I come back. (I'm going to Le Croisic in the Loire Atlantique. I rather doubt whether it is known for wifi hotspots, so don't suppose that I will be online.)

[zelda_pinwheel]

oh, we'll miss you ! have a good holiday. we'll all be here waiting for you when you get back. i'll cross my fingesr that it doesn't rain too much... (you can do the same for me !) if you decide to come inland a bit, look me up !

[montsnmags]

Originally Posted by Patricia

I'm off on holiday on Monday morning, till the 15th July, but will have a go when I come back. (I'm going to Le Croisic in the Loire Atlantique. I rather doubt whether it is known for wifi hotspots, so don't suppose that I will be online.)

~sigh~ [of vicarious pleasure] It sounds beautiful, and the "disconnect" of wifi-absence is like the strawberry on top. Have a wonderful time, Patricia.

Cheers,
Marc

[Madam Broshkina]

6. Even worse than HTMLs are TXT files. The classic problem here is text that should be italicized but isn't in ASCII. So the text usually appears like "...as in the classic work _The Gibbons of Algernon_." to indicate what should be The Gibbons of Algernon. To fix that, I use find/replace to locate each underscore and then highlight and italicize the text in BD - manually, again. Is there a simple way to automate that process?

Gutenmark automatically italicizes the following:

* _italicized_
* <i>italicized</i>
* /italicized/
* ~italicized~
* ~~italicized~~
* <italicized>
* *italicized*
* _/italicized/_
* _*italicized*_
* */italicized/*
* _*/italicized/*_
* /:italicized:/
* |:italicized:|
* ITALICIZED


http://www.sandroid.org/GutenMark/

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

When I convert a book using BD, I have four persistent problems of which three consume a lot of my time and one is just an annoyance:

I've only dabbled in BD thus far, but my question is why you are trying to do everything in BD. Things like killing the "helpful" page numbers PG puts into HTML files, and handling ASCII representations of text attributes like italics in text files might be bettered handled by other tools. I'd preprocess the files to do that stuff before importing to BD.

As mentioned by another poster, GutenMark may be just the thing for the text files. And something like a port of Unix "sed" or other automated search and replace tool that handles regular expressions would be good for the embedded page numbers.
______
Dennis

[Amalthia]

I think it's easier to stick to RTF files than use Book Designer.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Amothea

I think it's easier to stick to RTF files than use Book Designer.

And what if you don't happen to have an RTF file?
______
Dennis

[HarryT]

... or using a device which doesn't support RTF files?

[The Alternative]

Originally Posted by =X=

Well after wrestling with BookDesigner this weekend I got to wondering, wrestling Crocodiles can't be much harder?

What do you all think?

May I suggest reviewing Harry T's excellent guide on how to use BookDesigner here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10313

BookDesigner has served me well for over a year and I'm a mediocre techie at best. I've used it to convert many types of files (i.e. pdf, rtf, doc, lit, txt, and html) with very few problems. No doubt there are minor problems with it but overall I think it an excellent conversion tool.

If you’re having specific problems let us know. I'd be happy to try and help.

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by The Alternative

May I suggest reviewing Harry T's excellent guide on how to use BookDesigner here: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=10313

BookDesigner has served me well for over a year and I'm a mediocre techie at best. I've used it to convert many types of files (i.e. pdf, rtf, doc, lit, txt, and html) with very few problems. No doubt there are minor problems with it but overall I think it an excellent conversion tool.

If you’re having specific problems let us know. I'd be happy to try and help.

Absolutely. I would have been completely lost without Harry's terrific tutorial. But it's intended to get you through the common hurdles to ebook creation and is not a complete guide to resolving all the issues you can encounter, many of which are pretty frustrating.

[JSWolf]

To make blank lines between paragraphs for LRF eBooks, in the Makes Sony Reader file dialog select the options tab. Then under paragraphs select seperate and there you go. It's best that the book not actually have physical blank lines as this limits what you can do like make an eBook to upload here and then one formatted how you like it.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by The Alternative

May I suggest reviewing Harry T's excellent guide on how to use BookDesigner here:

Hi Alternative,
Yes I've read Harry T's guide and I agree it is excellent.

The challenges I came across usually fell outside of the scope of what the guild and BookDesinger where intended for, which is creating novels.

I found that creating simple books in BD is not so bad. Unfortunately most of the books I want to convert contain different formating and many pictures.

Thank you,
=X=

[JSWolf]

=X=, can you give us examples of what you want to do that you cannot do?

Most novels (that I know of) would be perfectly OK in Book Designer and then output as LRF.