I coded a very simple little utility which will reformat TXT files by removing the line breaks in them. It basically does exactly the same thing as what is explained in this tutorial by KSaraSara - except it will convert your files in just one click *and* if you stick all your files inside the same folder, the application is able to go through all of them and fix them all, instead of you having to open them one by one.

This is all the app does, remove line breaks... turning your fics into nice looking two or three column pages or changing the fonts is somewhat beyond my ability at the moment.

This link goes direct to the .zip file on my server -- it's very, very small (125k) so you guys on dial-up can get it without too much trouble.

TextFormat

There's a read-me in the zip, in case anyone reads those (*lol*), it explains how the app works, although it's about as straightforward as I could possibly make it.

If, for any reason, you have issues with it - or *gasp* you find bugs - I'm never very far away from a computer so don't hesitate to ask.

Cheers!

This is awesome! I wish I'd had this years ago. This will definitely come in handy when I have time to play catch up with my fic reading!

I do detect a problem, though. Hopefully a small one, but I'm not one for programming.

It works just fine for the newer fics, but there are older fics (and I'm not sure when the change happened) that have one extra space before the double hard return. This seems to throw the program off a bit. Maybe there's a way to code in an "if" function? (I say from my limited programming knowledge... knowledge that comes from 8th grade science class when we made Lego robots. )

Sara

ooooops! I can certainly fix that. An "if" statement is all it needs for sure.

Can you point me to a story that's formatted like that so I can use it as a test file? I was using one that was on the front page of the archive last week - it didn't occur to me that some might be formatted otherwise...

Thanks!

Definitely any of them from the first few years. This is the one I used for testing the program.

I'm glad it's an easy fix!

Sara

Lara, you are officially really freakin' cool. Thank you for doing this!

oi.... this is harder than I thought.

Somehow I thought it was just an extra space at the end of a line... An extra space at the end of the line I can remove easily (this way you will never find words separated by 2 spaces instead of just one) - it's a wonder I didn't think of that before!

This story, though... it has a forced double spacing plus indentation, and there isn't even a double hard return between paragraphs. *lol* I'm trying to figure out a magic formula for all this, but I'm not really entirely sure how to fix it in Word easily to begin with... I'll find something and make it work, I'm sure, it just might take a couple days. sorries!

Lara, I think you've done wonderfully as it is, and you're not going to find a program that will fix every story in the Archive - some of the early stuff has no standard formatting at all and is all over the place. You can't think ahead for every eventuality.

So don't apologise! You've been an enormous help.

LabRat

Holy rusted sheets of metal, Batman! This is really awesome. I've only used it once, but it saved me literally half an hour already!