No returns supported?
Sat, 07/19/2008 - 03:07 — AndreasvanHaren
No sure how you call them, but after pressing the return key, you go to the next line...
In the document that I import in Stanze, this doesn't seem to work.
This is how it looks like in my pdf file in Stanza:
DEL EN VREMDE ONTMOETINGEN HOFDSTUK EN EN ZWARE DAG 1 ‘Dit was de Spaanse les vor vandaag. Vergeet niet dat julie morgen de naamplaatjes moeten meenemen vor de koklessen, dat
and this is the original pdf:
DEEL EEN
VREEMDE ONTMOETINGEN
HOOFDSTUK EEN
EEN ZWARE DAG
1
‘Dit was de Spaanse les vor vandaag. Vergeet niet dat julie
morgen de naamplaatjes moeten meenemen vor de koklessen,
dat
Best wishes,
André van Haren
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Inserting ChapterBreaks and Paragraphs into Macintosh text files
The Macintosh uses different page-break and paragraph-break conventions than DOS/Windows or UNIX. Opening the file in a text processor and saving it again will help a lot IF you have a text processor that can save the file with the non-Mac conventions and if you tell it to do so. Probably the best free one is TextWrangler. Download it here (www.barebones.com/products/textwrangler/).
Here are the steps I'm currently going through in preparing text documents for transfer to Stanza:
__1. AUTHOR AND TITLE
I open the file in TextWrangler. At the beginning of the file, I type in
Title: X
Author: Y
(substituting X and Y with the real title and name, of course) to let Stanza know these details.
__2. CHAPTER BREAKS
I then check how the document signals its chapter divisions. Usually in Gutenberg, there are a couple of blank lines, the word 'CHAPTER' and the number then a blank line and then the chapter title. This won't cut it with Stanza. Fortunately, TextWrangler uses a powerful UNIX set of conventions for search and replace called GREP.
I open the Wrangler's Find/Replace dialogue, turn on GREP and Case Sensitive options, then choose my course of action:
- IF the book uses that pattern for chapter divisions,
I then type or paste this pattern into the Find box:
\r\rCHAPTER(.*)\r\r(.*)
and this into the Replace box:
\r\fCHAPTER\1\r\2
- BUT IF the book I have already does Chapter number on one line and the title on the next, or if there are no chapter titles, just CHAPTER and number, then I can drop most of the junk in those search patterns.
find: \r\rCHAPTER
replace with: \r\fCHAPTER
That will make Stanza chapter breaks in the appropriate places. The '\f' inserts the ASCII character for a page break just before the word 'CHAPTER'.
__3. PARAGRAPH BREAKS
Then I choose the 'File" - 'Save As...' menu item. In the window that comes up, I hit the 'Options...' button, and choose 'DOS' from the 'Line Breaks:' pull-down menu and rename and save the file.
Viola: paragraphs and chapter breaks!
Out PDF reading does suffer
Out PDF reading does suffer from some limitations, and this is one of them: we cannot reliably detect some linebreaks in PDF files.
One possible (albeit tedious) solution would be to open the PDF in Stanza, then export it to Plain Text, edit the text file in a text editor, then re-import it into Stanza for reading. Depending on the content, this might be a simple task, or might be more laborious than is feasible.
We hope to have better support for linebreaks in PDF as time goes on.
I tried what you suggested
I tried what you suggested but the result is the same: lots of strange characters and no line breaks, no centering of title etc.
I start to wonder how it is possible that Stanza can read all those downloadable books correctly (no line breaks and no chapter break recognition?). How are they converted into a Stanza file?
André