Re: Trial Offer to small and intermediate publishers: one free conversion to ePub

Bill Janssen recommended:
> Jon Noring opined:

>> I prefer to start with a plain-text/Word/RTF/OpenOffice document,
>> but I will consider PDF sources if the text can be reliably
>> extracted without losing paragraph and text emphasis information
>> (you have no idea how many Word/PDF documents are so malformed that
>> getting accurate paragraph demarcations is not possible -- e.g.
>> line breaks occurring within a paragraph is a killer.)

> You might want to try running it through UpLib, too.  UpLib pulls
> text out of documents using a visual algorithm, instead of just the
> data in the format.  So the usual problems with format-internal
> storage of text don't really come up.  UpLib also runs a paragraph-
> finding algorithm automatically, and stores the paragraph breaks as
> part of the document metadata -- I use that info to convert any
> format to either HTML or PDF.

Thanks for the recommend! I'm always on the lookout for tools to ease
the burden of text cleanup/markup from malformed Word/PDF sources.

In the couple dozen books I've converted in the past (my own and for
a few other publishers), Word is often used/abused in non-standard
ways, making conversion to regularized/normalized plain text, or a
workable HTML document, problematic.

The most serious problem is intra-paragraph line breaks (quite common
among those who don't know how to use Word properly, which includes a
lot of authors.) Another problem is losing (or adding) division
headers. The header issue is less critical since there are not that
many of them in a typical book. But a typical book may have 1000 or
more paragraphs, and manually checking for proper paragraph breaks is
a real pain.

Jon Noring




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