Fixed-width txt to fluid one

[vitalyb]

Hi everyone,

I am wondering how I can convert books that look like that:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt

To books with regular fluid lines - Without the forced line-break every X characters.

Thanks!
Vitaly

[HarryT]

There are many tools that will do it. If you're a Windows user, you can use this freeware tool called "textify".

[vitalyb]

I guess I just used the wrong google search queries. I'll give textify a try. Thanks!
On the subject though, can anyone direct me to a way to do it in openoffice writer?

I'd prefer to everything in a single tool and I use writer for most of my conversions.

[vitalyb]

I've tried using Textify and it works great with latin fonts. However, with unicode (or cyrilic) I am having problems.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by vitalyb

I guess I just used the wrong google search queries. I'll give textify a try. Thanks!
On the subject though, can anyone direct me to a way to do it in openoffice writer?

I'd prefer to everything in a single tool and I use writer for most of my conversions.

It can be done in OpenOffice Writer, but it does take the following steps (I'm sure there are other ways, but this works for me, and I've used it with Project Gutenberg ebooks):

- Open up the text file in Writer.

- Save it as an HTML file, and then close the file.

- Open the HTML file in Writer. The paragraph style for all of the text will be "Preformatted Text"

- Select all of the text and change the paragraph style to "Text body."

-- This will separate the paragraphs, beginning each with "<p>" and ending them with "</p>"

-- The blank lines will be replaced with "</p><br><br><p>"

- Insert a space at the beginning of the text and then delete it. This will clean up the HTML formatting in the document.

- Under the "View" menu select "HTML Source." This will bring up the HTML source code for the document.

- Do a search and replace for "<p>" and replace it with nothing.

- Do a search and replace for "</p>" and replace it with one space.

- Do a search and replace for "<br><br>" and replace it with "</p><p>"

- Insert a "<p>" at the beginning of the text.

- Delete the final "<p>" at the end of the text.

- Go to the "View" menu and uncheck "HTML Source."

- Insert a space at the beginning of the text and then delete it. This will clean up the HTML formatting in the document.

- Save the document.

At this point, you can easily convert the document into other formats.

This reformatting technique works best if each paragraph in the text file is separated by a blank line. If the document contains line breaks (like many lines at the beginning of Project Gutenberg ebooks), you will have to put them back into the document manually.

Please let us know how this works for you.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by vitalyb

Hi everyone,

I am wondering how I can convert books that look like that:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11.txt

To books with regular fluid lines - Without the forced line-break every X characters.

Thanks!
Vitaly

There's already a properly formatted .html version of that text available from www.gutenberg.org. It's http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11/11-h.zip and just needs to be unzipped, have the Gutenberg preamble and legalese stripped and converted to ebook form. Hey, guess what, ALL that can be done for you using my freeware GuteBook (see my sig for the link).

Aside: Basically, you install the GuteBook program, enter "11", click your desired ebook output and Click "Convert". It requires that calibre and some (optional) other supporting programs be installed once, then it can convert almost any Guteberg.org offering, though some ebooks come out better than others due to coding styles that are better suited to ebook conversion.