Science Fiction Phillips, Mark: Queen's Own FBI Trilogy. v2, 9 Jun 2008

[HarryT]

SF trilogy, actually written by Gordon Randall Garrett and Laurence Mark Janifer. The three books in the series are:

• Brain Twister
• The Impossibles
• Supermind

Brain Twister was nominated for the 1960 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

Description from FictionWise:

The Legendary Hugo Nominee SF Trilogy in One Volume! All the FBI needed to save America was a telepath. Then agent Kenneth Malone found one. Only she was crazy and thought she was Queen Elizabeth I. To get that sweet little old lady's help he and the FBI would have to dress up in 16th century court costumes and pretend to be her nobles. Malone need her help again when teen age gang members can escape police and payment for their crimes by teleporting away and vanishing--appearing to simply wink out like a light. Finally Malone and the FBI must adopt their 16th century guise again when they enlist that sweet little old lady again to help find the psionic with the negative energy field whose every thought is an occasion for disaster. This classic trilogy is filled with flights of daring imagination and laughter. Written as by Mark Phillips, this was a triple AnLab Poll winner when it appeared in Astounding/Analog as That Sweet Little Old Lady, Out Like a Light, and Occasion for Disaster.

Enjoy!

EDIT: 19 Aug 07

Uploaded new version to fix problem with em-dashes.

EDIT: 9 Jun 08

Completely recreated the book to improve the layout and formatting. Uploaded v2.

Previous download count: 117

[JSWolf]

I do have one slight gripe with this.. No emdashes. Is your Book Corrector working? Do you need to grab the Book Correct files 1.3? The BC files version 1.3 does have -- being converted to —.

[HarryT]

I do have the correct files. Have you looked to see if the original books (which were ASCII text files, not HTML) had them?

[JSWolf]

The original has -- where it would be an emdash. I have my BC files set to convert -- to emdash on load. -- is the ascii version of emdash if you don't actually have emdash. Just like _some text_ is italic.

[HarryT]

I'm using the BC files which you and I created between us, Jon, so I don't know why they vanished.

This book required a lot of manual formatting (about 2h work after loading into BD), so forgive me if I'm reluctant to re-do it all .

EDIT: I've just checked, and my BC files definitely do convert "--" to "uni(137)" which is the emdash, so it's a bit of a mystery.

I'm not too bothered - the books look OK to me.

[JSWolf]

Take a look at your Book Cleaner In the input section before do you see a line that under find what starts with -- and replace with is uni(137) and then in the input section after you see unit(137) being converted to uni(151)?

I just loaded int he first book and the -- did convert to emdashes.

The thing is, I can't say about books 2 & 3, but book 1 does have a lot of emdashes.

[HarryT]

Yes, that's exactly it - I'm using your BC v1.3 files, Jon, and BD is definitely set up to use the correct files.

Obviously, feel free to do your own conversions if you don't like mine.

[Robert Marquard]

Best convert to — HTML entity if possible.
Now please the Mobipocket version as fast as possible :-) (i know it is already online)

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Robert Marquard

Best convert to — HTML entity if possible.
Now please the Mobipocket version as fast as possible :-) (i know it is already online)

Why is it that the text has -- instead of — when that is something that can be done in a text file?

Would &mdash work in BD?

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Yes, that's exactly it - I'm using your BC v1.3 files, Jon, and BD is definitely set up to use the correct files.

Obviously, feel free to do your own conversions if you don't like mine.

In that case, I think the solution might be very very very simple if the problem is what I think it might be. Go to the Make Sony Reader dialog and then the options tab. Under misc, what are dashes set for? In order to have emdashes, it should be set for "as it is" and then if your text has emdashes, they will come out as emdashes. I'm surprised I didn't think of this earlier.

[Robert Marquard]

The text from Gutenberg is ASCII with some simple enhancements for italics etc. -- denotes the mdash. When converting to HTML best choose the — entity to encode it. It must work in BD.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

In that case, I think the solution might be very very very simple if the problem is what I think it might be. Go to the Make Sony Reader dialog and then the options tab. Under misc, what are dashes set for? In order to have emdashes, it should be set for "as it is" and then if your text has emdashes, they will come out as emdashes. I'm surprised I didn't think of this earlier.

You were right - that was it. I've uploaded a new version. Thanks for the tip - I wasn't aware of that, not being bothered about the difference between hyphens and dashes personally . There wasn't a problem with the MobiPocket version - that just got it right first time.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Why is it that the text has -- instead of — when that is something that can be done in a text file?

PG produces ASCII text files; the emdash is not a part of the ASCII character set.

ASCII consists of the character codes 0-127, which are standardised. Characters in the range 128-255 vary according to which "code page" one is using; the emdash character you quote above displays correctly in the "Latin 1" code page which most English-speaking countries, and much of western Europe, uses, but it will not display correctly in other code pages.

As an experiment, try viewing this message, in which there is a quoted emdash, if other code pages. If you're using Internet Explorer, go to the "View" menu, select "Encoding", and try some of the other settings such as "Central European"; you'll find that the emdash does not display correctly.

[HarryT]

Completely recreated the book to improve the layout and formatting. Uploaded v2.