Guttenberg Text Format Roundup

A few weeks back, I posted how to prepare Gutenberg text for PDAs using a simple text editor. Here’s what we had to add.

• There is a perl script that cleans up Gutenberg texts nicely. It turns them into html, but if you need plain text, you can always open an html file in a browser and save it as plain text. The script is called gut, and works under Windows, Linux, and OS X.
• Use BareBones’s free TextWrangler (OSX only). In TW’s Text menu, just choose Remove Line Breaks. This automatically preserves double carriage returns but removes all single line breaks. I do this all the time before sending a text file to my PDA via Plucker.
  
• The windows equiv to TextWrangler, HTML-Kit, is an awesome text/markup editor with a strip linebreaks feature (not sure exactly how it preserves double line breaks, but i’ve certainly used it for this purpose plenty in the past.)
  
• Check out Manybooks.net. They have done this for many Gutenburg etexts already and put them straight into PDA formats for free.
  
• Another OS X solution: Word Services is a collection of system services which allow the manipulation of text in any “services-aware” application, including the “Reformat” service. Open Gutenburg etext then, Services>Format>Reformat. Bingo! Quick and easy removal of line endings in virtually anything, including TextEdit.
  

Prepare a Gutenberg text for eReading

Die Dulci Fruere