Features News Next Release Future Plans Download Installation History Notes

E-Book Tidy

This is the new home of the Text Manipulation software “E-Book Tidy”, a windows program designed to help reformat e-Books and other large documents.

I originally wrote it because I was tired of manually reformatting e-books, especially e-books where there was a CR/LF pair at the end of each line of text. I had tried various other text formatting programs, the best of which was Interparse.

Interparse however is let down (in my opinion) by a non-standard user interface, making it hard to get to grips with some of its features. So I decided to write a rotuine that would join those split lines. I played around with various algorythms before coming up with the one it uses now.

The rest of the program grew around that routine, I hate to have to use multiple programs to do the job so I kept adding features until it did just what I want. E-Book Tidy is not finished yet and may never be, it will keep evolving to suit the e-books that need formatting.

WARNING This is Beta software, I'm changing it constantly, I give no guarantee that changes made will be backwardly compatible. If you've set up any of the external config files and lose it all because I've changed the format or something then I'll feel sorry for you but you'll just have to set it up again.

I also offer no guarantees as to fitness of this software for any purpose, you use it at your own risk. If it turns your skin green and transports you to the Crab Nebula it ain't my fault (I would however be interested in getting a postcard). You have been warned!


Features

The following are features that currently work in E-Book Tidy:

  • Load & Save Text, HTLM, RTF & PalmDoc Documents
  • Convert Tags (Bold, Italics) between HTML, RTF and Plain Text
  • Normal Cut/Copy/Paste operations
  • Find/Find Next/Replace of text.
  • Preview your document. There are RTF, HTML and Plain Text Previews Available.
  • The following operations operate on the currently selected text (or the whole document if no text is selected):

  • Join Lines
  • Join Quotes
  • Split Lines at Page Width
  • Remove Blank Lines
  • Remove Extra Blank Lines
  • Add Carriage Return after Paragraph.
  • Trim Right Spaces
  • Indent Paragraphs
  • Unindent Paragraphs
  • Remove Numeric only lines
  • Delete initial numeric
  • Delete trailing numeric
  • Convert extended Ascii
  • Remove Extra Spaces
  • To Uppercase
  • To Lowercase
  • To Sentence Case
  • Invert Case
  • Convert Single to Double Quotes
  • Spell Check the document

  • News

    Thu 8th Apr 2004 Released Version 0.152 see Versions for details.
    Fri 2nd Jan 2004 Released Version 0.150 see Versions for details.
    Wed 17th Dec 2003 Released Version 0.140 see Versions for details.

    This is a major change in direction for E-Book Tidy. Up to now it was dedicated to tidying up plain text documents with import facilities to get RTF/HTML files loaded and converted to plain text.

    Now it is also able to convert files between various formats whilst keeping the formatting (at least some of it) intact. Be Warned that this version _will_probably_ have bugs.
    Fri 12th Dec 2003 Released Version 0.130 see Versions for details
    Thu 11th Dec 2003 Received the first feedback from a user (thanks Salmut) and got a few ideas for new stuff. I now know at least one of the 90 people who visited this site or its mirror in the last two days has tried the program :-)
    Wed 10th Dec 2003 Released Version 0.121 see Versions for details
    Tue 9th Dec 2003 Released Version 0.120 see Versions for details


    Next Release

    The following is planned for the next release:

  • Fix bugs found due to someone other than me using it.
  • UPdate the Help File.
  • Warning, Things are changing too rapidly at the moment to bother updating this section. Once the initial rush of extra work is over and I'm doing a release every month or so, I'll start putting stuff here again.


    Future Plans

    These are a few ideas I would like to implement sometime in the future.

  • Schedule upload to Palm device
  • Load/save or Import from other palm formats

  • Download

    E-Book Tidy


    Installation Instructions

    E-Book Tidy does not have an installation routine, all you need to do is unzip the archive into a directory of your choice. if required you can create a shortcut on the desktop to point to the E-Book Tidy .EXE file.

    To Uninstall, simply delete the directory you put E-Book Tidy in.


    Version History

    Version

    Description

    0.0152 Just a simple bug fix for this release, it solves a problem with importing some Palmdoc files. Specifically where there is a problem with the creation date in the header of the file.
    0.0150 Added the ability to define your own tags for HTML/RTF/Text, this allows you to convert between formats whilst retaining the features you require. See the Preferences for this.

    Modified some routines to be scripts, this will hopefully be extended to be a complete scripting language enabling other people to contribute usefull routines.

    Added a spell checker. Note: to keep the download small, I've only included a basic dictionary, If enough people find the spellchecker useful, I'll add a separate download with a better dictionary. In the mean time, you can use the "Add" option to add the word to the custom dictionary.

    General Code Cleanup. As I've added so much recently, the sourcecode for E-Book Tidy was getting a bit cumbersome and awkward to follow, so I've rearranged a few thiongs, split it up into separate units and added some more comments. You will not see any benefit from this except that I should be able to continue developing a reasonably bug free program.
    0.0140 Added work around for 32k Limit in older versions of windows

    Added HTML & RTF Files to the standard Load Files Routine. Note that when a HTML or RTF document is loaded, the header is removed, but any tags within the body of the document are preserved

    Added HTML, RTF & Text tags to the Preferences screen. This allows you to set up the system to handle whatever tags you like.

    Added HTML, RTF & Text Previews.

    Added New Menu, Documents, to allow you to specify what type of documetn you are working on. It is automatically set when you load or save a document, but can be manually changed if you alter the tags etc within a document.

    Added HTML & RTF Header Strings to the Preferences Screen, these give the ability to customise the HTML & Rich Text files that the program produces.

    Added routines to save the document as HTML or RTF.

    Added New Menu, Tags, with routines to convert between different types of tags (HTLM, RTF & Text) and to strip out HTML or RTF formatting.

    0.0130
  • Added Split Lines Function, this splits the highlighted Lines (or all if none highlighted) at the right margin.

  • Note, resizing the window will have an effect on this.

  • Added Paragraph indent routine, this will indent each paragraph by either a Tab of a set number of spaces.

  • A New section in the Preferences allows you to set whether to use tab or spaces and the number of spaces to use.

  • Reorganised menu's slightly to be more in line with standard windows applications.

  • Find/Replace is now under the Edit Menu, Trim Left is Renamed to Unindent and has moved to the Paragraphs menu along with the Indent

  • Smothed out the Code for updating the visible text. It should no longer flicker when returning from functions.


  • Added Program Version number to the About screen so users can tell which version they have.


  • Added "Invert Case" routine to the Characters Menu, this will turn any lowercase letters to upper and vice versa.

  • Works on either highlighted text or whole document.

  • Added "Delete Extended Ascii" back in.

  • This was removed in version 0.110 in favour of "Convert extended Ascii", turns out both are handy, whodathunkit?

    WARNING! I have reorganised the .INI file in this version. Check your settings as some may be lost. To ensure you don't lose your settings, you can manually edit your INI file and rename the [HTMLImport] section to [Import].
    0.0121 Bugfix Release. The release I made yesterday has a memory leak in the new INI file reading/writing rotuines. This should fix it.
    0.0120 Re-wrote the RTF Import to be in line with the HTML version. Both can now use the Text Markers. A new external File "RTF.IMP" holds the data for this.

    Added a Preferences form so that you can set whether you want to use the Text Markers when importing and a few other global settings.

    Added a routine to convert single quotes to double ones. It attempts to determine whether an occurance is a quote or an apostrophe, I hope it works Ok, it seems to but you never know.

    Added an Export to HTML option. Only really effective if you have the Text markers to give some layout info, but will create valid html files regardless. Again it can be customised using an exernal file.

    Renamed the external files to make a bit more sense. we now have HTML.IMP (used to be html.ext), RTF.IMP (new for RTF import), CHARS.EXT, HTML.EXP (New for HTML export). Examples of all these files are in the download.
    0.0110 Added the ability to convert HTML Tags to Plain text "markers". Fixed up the Save As Routine to suggest the current filename.
    0.0100 Initial Release.


    Useful notes:

    Joining Lines

    the algorythm used to join lines relies on the last character on a line being a lowercase letter, a dash ( - ) or a comma ( , ) and the following line not beginning with a number or q quote ( " )

    To Propercase

    This routine, unlike normal Proper Case will only capitalise the first letter of a sentence.

    Convert Extended Ascii

    This routine uses an external text file named "chars.ext" which holds the character codes to convert in the form "from=to" i.e. 128=65 would result in any Ascii Character 128 characters in the document being converted to capital A's.
    A Routine "Add Conversion" under the Tools menu allows you to highlight an extended character and set a conversion rule for it.

    Find & Replace Tricks

    When doing a find or Find/Replace, you can use ^p for Paragraph and ^t for TAB