05-22-2010, 10:23 PM | #1 |
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How do I fix bad formatting?
I have an epub of a book that someone must have formatted wrong. The line breaks are all in the wrong places. For example it will look like:
"One final week and she would leave middle school behind forever and start anew as a high school freshman, mingling with kids from two other junior highs." Another problem is there are no quotation marks when people speak. Great, I looked hypnotized in my picture, Kendra groaned. |
05-22-2010, 10:52 PM | #3 | |
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Quote:
Sigil and a lot of tedious work will put them back. Having the original, unblemished image will help get Paragraphs correct. Otherwise removing the hard return when not at a line end is a close second. If yo have a TXT file, Notepad++ (windows) has a tool that "unwraps a marked block. Still a lot of work. |
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05-22-2010, 11:19 PM | #4 | |
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05-22-2010, 11:22 PM | #5 |
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Wow
Hmm, I guess it's not a good idea to post questions about formatting problems or questions... not with the ebook police floating around.
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05-22-2010, 11:53 PM | #6 |
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What police? Some of us would like to know the source so that we do not waste our money purchasing a poorly formatted book.
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05-23-2010, 01:11 AM | #7 |
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This poorly formatted book was one that someone sent me so I don't know the source. I actually own the Kindle version, but wanted to read it with iBooks instead because I like that reader better. Is there a way to just drag my kindle books into iTunes and sync to iBooks? Or is there DRM that gets in the way of that?
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05-23-2010, 01:21 AM | #8 |
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iBooks require books to be in ePub format,which is not the format used by the Kindle.
You basically have two choices: - use the kindle app on the iPad instead of iBooks so that they can be used "as is". - Remove the DRM from the Kindle books (google for methods of doing this) and then convert them to ePub format using Calibre. |
05-23-2010, 11:15 AM | #9 |
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The only thing that worries me about converting a well formatted book with calibre is I might mess up the images. For example I had a PDF book that had full page maps at the front. After converting them with calibre, all the rectangular maps were made square.
I have it set to convert for iPad, so I don't know why that happened. |
05-23-2010, 12:09 PM | #10 |
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PDF is one of the more difficult formats to convert. MOBI files will come out much better when converting to EPUB. MOBI to EPUB should look pretty much identical.
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05-23-2010, 12:12 PM | #11 | |
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05-24-2010, 12:30 PM | #12 |
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True, I could. But I'd like to put it in iBooks for 2 reasons:
1. I like to have my entire collection in one place. It's like some songs only working on Windows Media and some only working on iTunes - that would drive me nuts. 2. I like the landscape mode that iBooks uses where it splits the view into two columns. (except that kindle reader has a Night Time mode, which I do like) |
05-24-2010, 02:18 PM | #13 |
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Hi Ghostgrass.
I've run into the same kind of badly formatted files.The replies are right on target. You need to either: (1) hand-edit the file using something like Sigil - very-very time consuming - you should have (or will acquire) a basic understanding of HTML codes. (2) search for a better source version and try converting to your preferred format with Calibre. - There are a lot of different versions floating around, so this is quite possible. Of possible help is GrannyFix, a collection of 1-trick ponies (reg-ex) to clean up badly formatted text-files. As I run into new problems, I write another function, so it's a work in progress. View your text/pdf (?) file on your screen, right-click-copy the text and paste it into the text-box then pick & choose. If you are lucky, there is an extra blank line inbetween the paragraphs in addition to the internal hard-returns at each line. Also, Stingo wrote a macro for MS-WORD that is highly regarded. Good Luck. RocketGranny Last edited by rocketgranny; 05-25-2010 at 12:33 PM. |
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