[bksvol-discuss] Re: clearing out line breaks
- From: "Paula and James Muysenberg" <outofsightlife@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 17:58:52 -0500
Kellie, these are great suggestions! When you are editing in K1000, do
you read one line at a time, using the arrow keys, or do you use the
Continuous Reading hotkey? I've noticed that even with adjusting Verbosity
settings, I seem to be unable to have K1k indicate the presence of blank
lines, when Continuous Reading is enabled. I end up editing in Word, so I
can hear the word "blank", even when reading continuously. Am I missing
something with K1000, or is arrowing down a line at a time the only way to
determine the location of blank lines?
Thanks,
Paula
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kellie Hartmann" <kellhart@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Saturday, August 14, 2004 1:30 PM
Subject: [bksvol-discuss] Re: clearing out line breaks
> Hi E,
> I have a system for dealing with this problem, which can occur as a result
> of formatting for a display but also is common among books scanned by
older
> scanning software, such as the Reading Edge.
>
> First, I recommend that you use Kurzweil for this kind of work, and not
the
> BN. The BN's search and replace sometimes misses things for some
> unfathomable reason. The following is best done before you've gone through
> and read any or all of the book for correcting scanner errors; if you do
> these search/replace operations first and then go through the book you'll
be
> able to fix anything that slips through the cracks or gets altered
> unnecessarily. In Kurzweil you search for a hard linebreak by putting
> backslash n in the search/replace. So what I usually do is open the file
in
> k1k, and then examine it a little. First of all, check out the pattern of
> the words split by hyphens and linebreaks. Is there a space between the
> hyphen and the linebreak, or between the linebreak and the other half of
the
> word? Establish the pattern, and then replace that string. For example,
you
> may do your search for something like hyphen space linebreak or hyphen
> linebreak space depending on the pattern, then replace that string with
> nothing. That should clear up most of those without messing anything else
> up. Next is there anything that distinguishes the pattern of arbitrary
line
> breaks from those that denote paragraph boundaries? For example, I've seen
> cases where there were two spaces preceding line breaks that represented
new
> paragraphs and no spaces before the arbitrary ones. when this happens your
> clean-up is simple. In the above example I would do the following;
> 1. go into find and replace.
> 2. search for all line breaks preceded by two spaces.
> 3. replace them with a search string that you know for sure does not
appear
> in the book, such as an odd punctuation mark or combination thereof, such
as
> ^3. Now the file will look like a bit of a mess, but that will soon be
> fixed.
> 4. Replace all remaining line breaks with one space.
> 5. Now replace the search string you used to replace the desirable line
> breaks, in my example ^3, with line breaks again. Before you save these
> changes do some checking to be sure things have turned out as you expected
> with no unanticipated consequences. I would recommend doing a save-as and
> saving under a different filename, that way if something weird has
happened
> you can start over without too much difficulty.
>
> Now, if there is nothing to differentiate between the linebreaks you want
> and those you don't things get a little more complicated. What I do is a
> series of search-and-replace operations replacing combinations like period
> newline, quote newline, question mark newline, and exclamation point
newline
> with other search strings that don't appear in your file. For example, I
> would replace period newline with period ^3. Replace quote newline with
> quote ^3. Do the same with question mark and exclamation point. Once
you've
> done all that find all remaining linebreaks and replace them with one
space.
> Then go back and reverse all the earlier search/replaces and replace
period
> ^3 with period newline, etc.
>
> I know this sounds like an absolutely awful mess, and it is, but I've
found
> it does work and give very good results. It took me a while to get the
hang
> of this and I had to start over quite a few times, but the results have
been
> worthwhile in my opinion and it's way better than doing even a little of
> this by hand. You have to be careful and pay attention, and I don't blame
> anyone for not wanting to mess with this, but if you're interested in the
> book and the text quality is high your end product will be highly
> satisfactory.
> Hth, and if you have any questions feel free to ask me,
> Kellie
>
>
>
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