GUIDE: Converting Gutenberg eBooks for MiniPlayer use

Hi all,

been fooling around with my new MiniPlayer today, extremely happy with it so far. =D

As someone else in here mentioned, you can get free (public domain) .txt format eBooks over at Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org), but after snatching a few of them I noticed that they don't really work all that well on the M6 screen. The problem is that PG have added line breaks that don't really fit the width of the M6 screen, which means you get really bad text layout. The following is a suggestion on how to get around this:

Get a good text editor. I personally use EditPlus, but any slightly advanced text editor should do, as long as it supports Regular Expressions and the ability to Join Lines.

1) Open up youe .txt eBook and select all the text (CTRL-A).

2) Next, you need to find the Join Lines function. In EditPlus it's (CTRL-SHIFT-J). This removes most of the line breaks in the document, but leaves a single break between each paragraph of text.

3) A book can be kinda hard to read if all the text is scrunched together like this, so we want to get some more space in there. Find your editor's Replace function, and make sure it supports Regular Expressions. You basically want to replace all single line breaks (they're all single right now) with *two* line breaks. In the replace function, type "\n" (without the " ") in the Find field, and type "\n\n" (again without " ") in the Replace With field. This will replace all line breaks with two line breaks, giving you the same text layout as the file originally had, but without all the extra line breaks that don't work on the MiniPlayer screen.

Happy reading! =)

Cheers,
NightGolfer

Ps.: If you don't know which books to download, check out the following link which has the top 100 books downloaded from gutenberg.org the past 30 days:
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top#books-last30

Interesting but, two brakelines will sort it as small, non-finished paragraphs. Oh well, i guess that a whole paragraph might be the right option for me.

Not quite sure what you mean, works great for me and it is basically the same formatting that the file already has when you download it from gutenborg.org, only without the forced linebreaks.

Maybe I just didn't describe it well enough - check the attached file, it's chapter 1 of The Count of Monte Cristo with my formatting applied. Try copying it to your MiniPlayer and see if it's not acceptable =)

Alternately, if you don't link the extra spacing between the paragraphs, simply replace the linebreaks with a linebreak and, say, 5 spaces (or a tab). That way you don't get the extra space, but each new paragraph is indented.

Ah, you're link includes the ')' at the end so it doesn't work,

other than that, I simply leave it as it is, its puite fine by me

It'd be great if someone made a commandline script for this, automating the conversion of many files at once.

Argghh I wish the meizu had an option for fixed-width fonts - its so annoying trying to read things with ascii diagrams in and tables of data O-o.

Can I also add that for .lit (microsoft e-book files) there is a free converter called ConvertLIT GUI which will convert the e-book into HTML. You can then use the, also free, HTMLAsText to turn it into an ascii text document. Hope this saves someone as much time and trouble as it took me =]

Also, if you are using TextPad, you can select everything, make sure word-wrapping is on, and click on edit > reformat. TextPad's 'join lines' takes it pretty literally - everything ends up on one single line.

Thanks for sharing nightgolfer

It worked great for me. Tere are some empty spaces throughout the text, (like this: text text text text text text text text) but aside from that, it looks great.

Best,
MZ

try this:

http://www.textfixer.com/tools/remove-line-breaks.php

I use uedit-32 to clean up files to view in Meizu..
Here's what I do.

1. I copy all of the files I want to clean up to one directory.
( I keep the originals as is because I sometimes want to use them with other programs.)

2. I click on "file" "open".
navigate to the directory where the files are located,
hold "control" down and click on the files I want to clean up,
then click on "open".

This will open the files and display a line of tabs with the file names.
The text of one of the files is displayed.

3. I hold down the left mouse button,
and mark and copy a phrase I want to get rid of.

4. I click on "search "replace"
and paste the phrase into "find what"

5. I type a space in "replace with"

6. I mark "All open files" and click "replace all"
a few times.

7. I do this for all of the phrases I want to get rid of.

8. I then click on the other tab, and this displays the
text in the other files, and I get rid of other unwanted phrases,
using steps 3-7

At this point, I have added a lot of unwanted spaces
along with any unwanted spaces that might be in the original files,
so I click on "search" "replace" and enter two spaces in "find what"
and one space in "replace with" and click "replace all" a few times.

This gets rid of multiple spaces.

9. As I may still have some leading spaces,
I click on "search" "replace" and enter ^p and a space in "find what"
and a ^p in "replace with" and click "replace all" a few times.

This gets rid of any leading spaces.

10. As I may still have some blank lines
I click on "search" "replace" and enter ^p^p and a space in "find what"
and ^p in "replace with" and click "replace all" a few times.

This gets rid of the blank lines.

Note that you have to have the "Regular Expression" box checked
in the replace function.

11. I take a look at each of the files and see if they are
okay, and if they are, I save them.

You can use the powerful macro feature of uedit-32
to automate some of your editing.

This techniue should work with any editor
that support multiple open files,
and "Regular Expressions".

To get rid of annoying page numbers like "123."
I enter %1???, %2???, etc. in step 9 above.

You can delete any "bak" files,
and even the edited files
after you upload them to your Meizu.

Thanks for your contribution Nightgolfer. I think with the release of Rockbox for the M6/M3, you would have better support for E-book functions.