Formatting in books from Project Gutenberg

Wed, 02/04/2009 - 03:43 — Harry R

I got Stanza for my iPhone mainly to read books from Project Gutenberg. The versions available for download via the phone seem to be the .txt files, complete with formatting like _italics_ instead of italics. Which seems a pity and is a mild irritation.

I have no idea how easy it would be to provide versions with proper italics instead, but I just thought I'd flag it up as something that would improve my experience of using the app.

Great application, though.

Fri, 02/06/2009 - 03:16 — Harry R

I'm glad to know about

I'm glad to know about Feedbooks and will check there first in future, but I have pretty obscure taste in books and actually the last few books I've downloaded from PG aren't on Feedbooks.

Thanks for all the suggestions, though :)

Thu, 02/05/2009 - 04:44 — Harry R

Just to clarify: most of the

Just to clarify: most of the books from PG are available in several versions, including HTML as well as plain text. But Stanza downloads the text version. I have actually, since posting this, experimented with downloading the HTML version and using Calibre to convert it to ePub, and it works, although obviously it's a bit of a fiddle.

Thu, 02/05/2009 - 10:31 — Anonymous (not verified)

FYI, most (but not all) of

FYI, most (but not all) of the PG books are available with the formatting you want in the Feedbooks catalog in the Online Catalog. There's usually no need to convert things yourself.

Wed, 02/04/2009 - 11:01 — Emily

Just a few comments: Stanza

Just a few comments:

Stanza iPhone most definitely supports styles! If you download a book from Feedbooks or buy a book from Fictionwise, you will see this in action.

The problem you are seeing is that the books you can get directly from Project Gutenberg don't have styles at all. They are in plain ASCII format. They have /the/ _stuff_ *like* THIS because italics and bold and such are not available in plain ASCII.

http://pge.rastko.net/faq/V-73

Many of the PG books are also available for free through Feedbooks, which often post-processes the files to convert the mark-up with _/* to italics, bold, etc.

If your book is one of the ones that Feedbooks doesn't have yet, you could search and replace _/* with the corresponding style in your file using Word, then converted it to ePub using Calibre, since Stanza Desktop strips out styles during conversion.

Wed, 02/04/2009 - 07:22 — nizuri

Stanza does not support

Stanza does not support formating yet, but I'm sure they're working on it. :)
I always thought under-slashes are being used for bold text.