[bksvol-discuss] Any easy way in Word to convert book submitted as two-column rtf ?
- From: "Judy s." <cherryjam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:57:22 -0600
I'm proofreading a young adult novel that's really had me frustrated.
Every page is really two pages. They obviously scanned it two
pages at a time, and when it was OCRed they didn't convert it
correctly. It ended up as every "page" in the rtf really being
two pages, coded in word as two side-by-side columns.
The book has zero page breaks. They are all section breaks, which
are usually easy to convert. In this case, when I convert them,
it runs the two columns (that are really two separate pages, side
by side) together. On top of that, it gives me a book that is one
long column and only one letter wide! Then, it still has a kind
of section break that's occurring on pages that have footnotes
that I've never seen before. The ^b command does not find those,
and I can't get Word to copy them so I can't figure out an ascii
code for them that way. I can't delete them easily, either. I've
had to go through the book by visually looking for them, putting
a blank line before and after them, highlighting that little
section, and then deleting it. I did a google search, and haven't
come up with a code for it either.
Has anyone found a way using Word to easily convert a book like
this into text that correctly has the pages one after another
instead of side by side? Highlighting the entire book and
removing the columns didn't work. I tried that several different
ways.
I figured out a messy brute-force way to do it finally, by
grabbing all the text and dumping it into a new rtf file as a
special paste with no formatting. That gives me the text pretty
much correctly (not completely - sometimes the columns are still
intermingled), but I have to put in all the page breaks
individually now. That isn't too bad, because it was missing
half of the page breaks anyways. However, I can only find the
missing ones by comparing the original rtf visually with my new
rtf since half of the page numbers are missing. Yuck.
Any thoughts on other ways to do this are welcome! The scan, by
the way, is beautiful to look at if you are sighted. It is an
exact match to what the book must have looked like in printed
form. But it's totally wrong for what we need! It's been
checked out and released by several volunteers before me, and I
sure know why! smile.
Judy s.
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