BookDesigner vs Crocodile Wrestling

[=X=]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

... There is a lot you can do with the elements like start a new section with no indent like some books do.

JSWolf can you elaborate on elements? Are these user definable?

BTW outside of the canned "Paragraph", "cite", "verse" i've found no way to modify the font and have it stick.

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

The problem with dropping text into BD is that it bypasses Book Cleaner and thus, anything that Book Cleaner is set to fix won't be fixed such as em dashes (for example). I know that BD has trouble with paragraphs sometimes when you load in a text file. So I don't know if this problem exists when pasting text.

I'm not sure that you are right about this, Jon.
1. If I drag and drop the icon of my source file into BD the book cleaner files work beautifully.
2. If I paste text into BD the book cleaner files don't work at all.

You are quite right about the TXT files. Don't put them straight into BD. It will make every single line into a paragraph. Stick the text file into a Word doc and run Stingo's Macro; edit the text as much as you like; then put it into BD.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Patricia

You are quite right about the TXT files. Don't put them straight into BD. It will make every single line into a paragraph. Stick the text file into a Word doc and run Stingo's Macro; edit the text as much as you like; then put it into BD.

I'm willing to bet the problem is EOL chars.

Under Unix/Linux, each line in a text file is delimited by a Line Feed character (Ctrl-J/ASCII 11). On a Mac (OS9, at least), each line is delimited by a Carriage Return (Ctrl-M/ASCII 13) Under DOS/Windows, each line is delimited by both, in a CRLF combination.

This is a constant PITA for folks who must move text files from one environment to another. Various *nix programs like compilers are unhappy if they see CRs in text files. Various Windows programs, like Notepad, are unhappy if they don't see them.

I suspect BD is treating CRs as paragraph markers.

My preference is a text editor that will let me specify what line endings to use when I save the file. My current standard editor is Notepad++, a free, open source product that does that among many other things.
______
Dennis

[kovidgoyal]

More likely the problem is whether to use a single or double hard line break as a paragraph ending marker. Depending on your source TXT file, one or the other is the correct approach.

[JSWolf]

If you have the eBook already loaded into Book Designer and it's formatted or an easy job to format it, then just keep it in BD and finish the job and then you can create your LRF from there.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Patricia

I'm not sure that you are right about this, Jon.
1. If I drag and drop the icon of my source file into BD the book cleaner files work beautifully.
2. If I paste text into BD the book cleaner files don't work at all.

You are quite right about the TXT files. Don't put them straight into BD. It will make every single line into a paragraph. Stick the text file into a Word doc and run Stingo's Macro; edit the text as much as you like; then put it into BD.

When you said dropping text into BD, I thought you meant cutting/pasting whch as you said doesn't work well as Book Cleaner doesn't do a thing.

Also, for those who are lost on Book Cleaner, have a look at https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11649 and also to grab the fdata files that are already setup and work well.

[nrapallo]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

... and also to grab the fdata files that are already setup ...

It's a given, that when dealing with BD, it always comes down to profanity; or am I just reading into the fdata term...

[tommy still]

Originally Posted by Patricia

Well, I use BD most evenings and have got used to its occasional oddities. I've never tried the crocodile wrestling (there aren't many in Wales) so can't make a useful comparison.
What's been giving you problems in BD?

Actually crocodile wrestling does occur in Wales.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=HnqQDXvt4CM&feature=related

[Patricia]

But thankfully not very often in the land of our fathers.

[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:

1. Often when I start with an HTML from PG, the transcriber has gone to so much effort that they've included the page numbers which appear sprinkled throughout the text as something like [Pg 256]. I dutifully remove these in BD using the find/replace function, enter [Pg and press F3 to march through the text and find these critters. But to remove them, I have to manually click on each one and delete them one at a time. It would be great to automate this but I haven't figured out how since the page numbers obviously change from one to the next. The last book I did today had over 500 pages and so this is quite tedious.

2. I really like to have a blank line after each paragraph. I know some people find this wasted white space, but I find it much easier to read ebooks that have them. Unfortunately, if the text I start with has such lines, BD very reliably removes them for me (it's a "feature"!). I have not found an option to select that would prevent that from happening. Nor have I found a way to use find/replace or something else to automate adding these back in. So I mindlessly scroll through the text, find the end of each paragraph, and manually click Enter after each one.

Do you understand, yet, why it takes me a couple of hours to convert each book?

3. Creating a linkable table of contents is a real chore and I'm sure it is everyone else. First, go to Element Browser and convert all of the Titles and Subtitles to Paragraphs. Then manually scroll through and create manual page breaks before the beginning of each chapter (but be sure to leave at least one blank line between the break and the chapter heading or the TOC in the LRF file you create won't work). Then create the TOC by manually copying the chapter headings to the Contents. Then highlight the headings and make them Titles, center the chapter subheadings, add the chapter headings that are now Titles to the list of Notes, and for each of these Notes create a link in the TOC. If there are five chapters, this is fine, but if there are 35 like the one I did today, be prepared for spending some real time - just to create a TOC!

4. Lastly, I have language issues (Arf!). I know that the BD settings let me choose a language which, if I pick the right one, should let me create ebooks that display diacritical marks correctly. But often I find that my ebooks contain Cyrillic letters and I'm wondering if I need to set the language in BD before I load a new book and immediately create a test ebook to see if the language I've chosen is correct. Or can I change the language later? Maybe I'm not doing this properly. Yesterday, I posted a The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî which I could not get BD to create with any diacritical marks correctly. That was really frustrating since there are many throughout the book.

Oh, yes. And then there's the "epic paragraph" (as our Good Master RWood mentioned). I had one of those for the first time yesterday. I got to a point where if I did anything else in BD (even add a Book Author, picture, etc.) all of the formatting was lost and my epic paragraph was created. I was stuck with having to Undo and create the ebook as it was or else start from the beginning. Go figure.

If anyone has suggestions for ways to help me tackle these problems, I would appreciate hearing from you. If these are mentioned in posts elsewhere, I would appreciate being pointed to them. Thanks. Now, how about we try wrestling some crocodiles?

[RickyMaveety]

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:

1. Often when I start with an HTML from PG, the transcriber has gone to so much effort that they've included the page numbers which appear sprinkled throughout the text as something like [Pg 256]. I dutifully remove these in BD using the find/replace function, enter [Pg and press F3 to march through the text and find these critters. But to remove them, I have to manually click on each one and delete them one at a time. It would be great to automate this but I haven't figured out how since the page numbers obviously change from one to the next. The last book I did today had over 500 pages and so this is quite tedious.

2. I really like to have a blank line after each paragraph. I know some people find this wasted white space, but I find it much easier to read ebooks that have them. Unfortunately, if the text I start with has such lines, BD very reliably removes them for me (it's a "feature"!). I have not found an option to select that would prevent that from happening. Nor have I found a way to use find/replace or something else to automate adding these back in. So I mindlessly scroll through the text, find the end of each paragraph, and manually click Enter after each one.

Do you understand, yet, why it takes me a couple of hours to convert each book?

3. Creating a linkable table of contents is a real chore and I'm sure it is everyone else. First, go to Element Browser and convert all of the Titles and Subtitles to Paragraphs. Then manually scroll through and create manual page breaks before the beginning of each chapter (but be sure to leave at least one blank line between the break and the chapter heading or the TOC in the LRF file you create won't work). Then create the TOC by manually copying the chapter headings to the Contents. Then highlight the headings and make them Titles, center the chapter subheadings, add the chapter headings that are now Titles to the list of Notes, and for each of these Notes create a link in the TOC. If there are five chapters, this is fine, but if there are 35 like the one I did today, be prepared for spending some real time - just to create a TOC!

4. Lastly, I have language issues (Arf!). I know that the BD settings let me choose a language which, if I pick the right one, should let me create ebooks that display diacritical marks correctly. But often I find that my ebooks contain Cyrillic letters and I'm wondering if I need to set the language in BD before I load a new book and immediately create a test ebook to see if the language I've chosen is correct. Or can I change the language later? Maybe I'm not doing this properly. Yesterday, I posted a The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî which I could not get BD to create with any diacritical marks correctly. That was really frustrating since there are many throughout the book.

Oh, yes. And then there's the "epic paragraph" (as our Good Master RWood mentioned). I had one of those for the first time yesterday. I got to a point where if I did anything else in BD (even add a Book Author, picture, etc.) all of the formatting was lost and my epic paragraph was created. I was stuck with having to Undo and create the ebook as it was or else start from the beginning. Go figure.

If anyone has suggestions for ways to help me tackle these problems, I would appreciate hearing from you. If these are mentioned in posts elsewhere, I would appreciate being pointed to them. Thanks. Now, how about we try wrestling some crocodiles?

If you want to give me a copy of the HTML, I can probably take those page references out with a batch function. If I can, it would only take me about 30 seconds to do it. Then, I could just shoot the revised HTML back to you. It's probably worth a try anyway ....

[vivaldirules]

Originally Posted by RickyMaveety

If you want to give me a copy of the HTML, I can probably take those page references out with a batch function. If I can, it would only take me about 30 seconds to do it. Then, I could just shoot the revised HTML back to you. It's probably worth a try anyway ....

While I appreciate your offer, I think it's impractical to ask that you do this whenever I may have a need. If possible, I'd like to learn of a way to do this without bugging someone. If the search/replace command in Word, for example, let's me use wildcards for the page number then perhaps I could edit the HTML file before I open it with BD.

And another couple of things:

5. The HTMLs at PG often have hyperlinks to figures, page numbers, etc.(e.g., "see Fig. 69" where Fig. 69 will be a link to that figure). If I leave these in, the resulting ebooks (e.g., LRF) will have broken links. So I remove them all. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way to globally remove Links in BD even though I can easily remove all the Notes at once from the Notes and Links gizzie. So I manually find each Link, delete it, and retype what was there.

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?

[RickyMaveety]

Originally Posted by vivaldirules

While I appreciate your offer, I think it's impractical to ask that you do this whenever I may have a need. If possible, I'd like to learn of a way to do this without bugging someone. If the search/replace command in Word, for example, let's me use wildcards for the page number then perhaps I could edit the HTML file before I open it with BD.

And another couple of things:

5. The HTMLs at PG often have hyperlinks to figures, page numbers, etc.(e.g., "see Fig. 69" where Fig. 69 will be a link to that figure). If I leave these in, the resulting ebooks (e.g., LRF) will have broken links. So I remove them all. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find a way to globally remove Links in BD even though I can easily remove all the Notes at once from the Notes and Links gizzie. So I manually find each Link, delete it, and retype what was there.

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?

Yeah .... well, that's why I offered. I'm not certain it can be done in Word because M$ tends to make its programs a little to "user friendly" ... such that you really can't get into the various formatting codes.

I use Wordperfect, which does allow me to use wildcards and other codes in my search and replace functions. The problem is that Wordperfect is not an inexpensive program. Sorry I can't be of more help.

[Patricia]

VR, here are some more hints:

Page numbers
You can strip them automatically like this.
1. If in html then click on the 'edit in Word icon' (If in doc, don't.)
Then use regular expressions to get rid of page numbers:

To strip page numbers
For a page number of the form:
[Pg xxx]
set the search string to "\[Pg [0-9]*\]" - that is, the character "[", then "Pg ", then a sequence of characters in the range 0-9, then another character "]".
Set the replace string as emply, and check the "RegEx" box on the search dialog.
(This hint came from one of HarryT's posts. I copied and used it a lot.)

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

Blank line between paras.
If they're in the source text then leave them.
If they are not there then use 'find and replace' (Edit menu) to find one paragraph mark and replace with two paragraph marks. (Within 'find and replace go on to 'more and 'special' to find the paragraph marks thingy.)

TOCs
1. Just make sure that everything you want in the TOC is labelled as a title.
2. Then it is useful to go to 'format/more transformations/insert all line breaks' then use the 'element browser/tools/titles' to check that all the line breaks have appeared. Insert the missing ones manually.
3. The go to the beginning. Click under the book title and then on Insert/insert TOC. An automatic TOC will magically appear. It will usually position itself above one of the subtitles. But just copy, cut and paste the now-wrongly-placed subtitle.
Incidentally, it always appears headed 'Table of Content.' This is a monor translation glitch. Just add an s.

Language
Whatever language you are actually using, just choose German. It has the full range of accents and works better than any of the other options. Between us, we've all proved this by bitter experience.

Epic Paragraphs
These are usually due to a stray html tag somewhere. Most of the time they seem to vanish if I replace the manual line breaks with paragraph breaks.
If not, then cutting and pasting the text into BD will work, as mentioned in an earlier post in this thread (with a hint on saving the emdashes).

[zelda_pinwheel]

patricia, i'm sensing that your "BD tips" wiki page would be greatly apprciated... are you ?