Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Epub conversion project - chapter splitting & fics in process

For what it's worth (or shall I say I'll put my two cents in? whatever expression you'd like ), I prefer the straight quotes over the curly ones, because they copy/paste to more places with less hassle. And I think it would be a nightmare to convert *back* to curly quotes, as Darth Michael showed by the work someone would have to do to make it work right. (Simple find-and-replace wouldn't work, that's for sure!) But I'm just looking at it from a "here's where it is now" POV--if the archive switches the default file type, that's another matter altogether.

Just finished the Home series finally! I forgot how prolific Nan was until I tried this. It's taking an awfully long time to get through all her fics. *g*

Sorry to be late replying, but Michael's last post sent me scurrying around to wikipedia, w3schools, php.net, and down the rabbit hole. Is it still 2010?

Michael wrote:

I agree they look better in plain text, though with a proportional font they'd look nice.

Doranwen wrote:

OK, straight quotes wins.

Michael wrote:

I think I understood about half of that. Regexes? Reverse-engineered punctuation? Great shades of Elvis!

Hey, you use what ya got! AbiWord is my hammer. One of 'em, anyway.

I was thinking more like save to doc from Word, open in AbiWord, save to simplest HTML, open HTML in text editor and search/replace i's in angle brackets for i's in braces...

... well sure, if you want to get all high-tech and super-efficient about it. :p Seriously, Michael, I'm in awe of your mad skills.

Lauren

... well sure, if you want to get all high-tech and super-efficient about it. :p Seriously, Michael, I'm in awe of your mad skills.

Aaaanyhow. If there's interest in a nice, little DOCX-2-UBB converter for simple documents (just text, italics and bold) I'm quite willing to share Just have to finish it first. Oh, and of course, it's also suited for DOCX-2-Archive.



Michael

Just a little update to let everyone know I *finally* finished converting all of Nan's stories (at least, the ones that are on the Archive) to epub! I got a little sidetracked, what with life being busy (and discovering my new favorite TV show, Sue Thomas F.B.Eye) . . . but I haven't forgotten this project! I'll keep working on fic conversion as I get the time.

(I need to keep a better eye on the What's New page--I totally missed Games People Play until I double-checked at the end to see if I had gotten all her fics converted.)

Taking a break from nostalgia and going back to the alphabetical order, I'm going to tackle Caroline K's fics next.

I finally pulled myself away from reading Sue Thomas fics and worked on Caroline K's fics tonight. Not too many, so done in one fell swoop. Enjoy!

While I converted, I read them, and had to chuckle at several funny lines:
"Do you have a headache?"
He let out a breath. "I certainly do. I found it on my front steps."
and
"It wasn't quite a date, but it was a lot more fun than tonight's dinner with Mr. I'm-So-Rich-and-Charming-and-Important."
"Did you just say *fun*?" Lucy stared at her. "I'm sorry - I was just talking to my sister, Lois. Did you happen to see where she went?"
*giggles* (And on another thought, how come all the Lucys in shows I've seen turn out to be matchmakers? Something about that name . . .)

Anyway, I shudder to think how long it will take me, but I'm going to convert Wendy's next, for nostalgia's sake (hers and Nan's were the first fics I ever encountered in L&Cdom). Considering how many there are, and how LONG every last one is, lol, I suspect it will be awhile.

(On an interesting note, my e-book reader recognizes bold and italics just fine in epubs, which is what we're creating, but NOT in html files. How curious . . .)

Doranwen, congrats on finishing Nan's stories! Look's like we're up to 220+ epub files now. Wendy's stories will probably take a while but it'll be nice to have them as epubs too.

It's been a while since I've checked in. Here's what I've been up to....

I've been reading about XML and XSLT (thanks, Michael! ) along with PHP. Still a slog, and still working on it, but I'm also tackling the problem from another angle. I've been going back to the oldest stories and putting them in our current format manually. Still got a ways to go with that, but I figure having all the stories consistent will simplify things later. Because those old stories certainly weren't consistently formatted -- it's worse than I thought! I bet you're thinking, "Well ... duh!"

Also, Doranwen, you asked if story filenames are duplicated, and I said no, but unfortunately I've found at least one case. What I didn't take into account was that the filename catalog is incomplete -- stories are missing from it. And I'd been checking new filenames against the filename catalog. Working on that too.

Still loving iPhone/iPod Touch Stanza for reading. And there's a newish feature in iTunes -- or it's been there all along and I missed it (argh!) -- which simplifies the process of getting fanfic epubs into Stanza: File Sharing. I added a how-to page in our wiki to show how it works.

Current problem is ... what to do with all that leftover Halloween candy. It's a good problem to have.

Lauren