TXT, RTF, and HTML conversion issues

[Andurian]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

No script, but I've had some luck using Word to replace period-return with period-return-return, and then add a return to the end of period-dblquote-return and period-space-return and period-doublequote-space-return. (.^p; ."^p, . ^p, ." ^p)

It's not 100% accurate, and you have to rotate through the rest of the end-of-sentence punctuation (question marks, exclamation points), but it gives a good start to work from--changes it from "add a return after every single paragraph" to "proofread for missing returns for quotes after a colon or emdash."

I suppose its a matter of taste whether you prefer to look for short lines ending in .^p etc. or whether you'd do it to all lines ending in that. My method would miss paragraphs that happen to end with a nearly full line of text, yours would mistakenly hit mid-paragraph sentences that happen to end a line with punctuation.

I suppose you could write both scripts and find the error rate.

Honestly, in my case I only "pirate" texts that I already own as pbooks, so when I encounter texts that end every line with ^p and don't give me a ready way to distinguish paragraphs I just give up on the text file and read the dead wood version.