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OT, Mac Text RescueText Wrangler

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Posted by Robert: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 13:33

1^st Post

I have resumed my long term project of preparing the text of my late fathers manuscript which he typed in 1972 but although accepted for publication he never finished it before he died in 1978, they asked him to re-type the whole manuscript again for the third time. With 240,000 words many in botanical Latin and many foreign place and personal names, it was a task too large with failing eyesight and ill health.

I OCR'd the manuscript using early scanners then a Nikon D1 to make the images. I had done all the spell checking and text layout but still needed to tackle the character formatting, I have been distracted by various projects but last week I returned to the manuscript on the 20th August. Imagine my amazement when I realised the last save date of the most recent version was 20th August 2011! o.O

Exactly 3 years ago, to the day, almost to the hour.

I am making good progress with the character styles in the main body of text, but realised I needed to check out the auxiliary text, the introduction, preface and glossary of terms etc. After much searching I eventually found them on an archive backup disk. However... They had been saved from Microsoft Word 4.0 in 2002. I no longer use MS Word and I don't have any word processor capable of opening an MS Word 4.0 file.

I turned to Text Wrangler, which did the job perfectly. So if you have the need to open an old text file on a Mac try Text Wrangler, no frills but it's quick and did the job perfectly for me.

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/11009/textwrangler

____________________
Robert.

Posted by Kathy Baker: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 13:57

2^nd Post

I am impressed. I too have an outline for a book I would like to finish, but I can't figure out how to work on such a large document. I am thinking I will need a separate laptop just to work on it. I use open office.

I am always amazed at how brainy you all are.

Posted by Robert: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 15:20

3^rd Post

Me, Brainy??? LOL I'm just a humble builder who types with two fingers! (And likes building cars...)

My approach was to break the text down into about 7 manageable batches The only problem if you are't VERY careful is you can get inconsistencies between the various chunks of text, That can be resolved by putting them all together and applying a basic style, then applying the styles you want for the entire document.

In this case my problem was I had done the ancillary text first, then shelved it, 12 years ago! I should have created a backup in plain ASCII text so I wasn't dependent on the MS Word format. Kind of like going back to RAW!

My biggest job was spell checking, as mentioned in my first post the manuscript if full of botanic plant names and foreign personal and place names. Spelling is not one of my strong points and then throw in the interesting factor that some of the name spelling is disputed between various 'expert' bodies. I gathered dictionaries (computerised word lists) from around the world, Kew, the Royal Botanic Society and other sources and played them off against one another by spell checking each one against my own custom list of about 90,000 words I had created manually. It was very interesting but also rather time consuming... I checked every word in my custom dictionary, letter by letter. Still the odd error slipped through. Amazingly, I found that by scanning my eye down an alphabetic sorted list of words I could spot errors from the shape of the words.

I still have to decide where to publish it. Popular convention suggests Kindle, possibly Apple iBooks but I am not sure I want to get involved with the American IRS, and the UK Customs and Revenue department, one other possibility is to 'sell' a PDF version from my own website. That is still down the road as it were, I rather resent giving Kindle (or Apple) 30% then the IRS 30%, The UK Customs and revenue wanting their cut, I may as well not bother. Have had major capital expenditure in software, computers and photographic equipment over the last 30 years, I can only offset purchases made in the last 2 years against any profits so that side of things could be even more complex than creating the publication.

There is also of course the traditional publishing route but for such a specialised work I think that may not be viable, especially to illustrate it.

____________________
Robert.

Posted by Kathy Baker: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 17:03

4^th Post

Alice in Writerland: A Writer's Adventures In The Ugly World Of PublishingI ordered this book a couple of years ago. I only read parts of it as i put it off till later.
There is sort of a publishing war going on right now. I would put the topic "book publishing" into a news feed of some sort and keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe you can get to the bottom of the issues eventually.

Posted by jk: Thu Aug 28th, 2014 18:55

5^th Post

I suggest that self-publishing in PDF whilst being low in bureaucracy and perceived problems brings in lower sales.
Put it on Amazon, Kindle, iBooks and let them do the management of sales and marketing and hope that you get a few sales that then snowball.

Most time you dont have to pay tax as it is within your allowable income. If you are a JKR then let the accountants do the work!

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Still learning after all these years!
https://nikondslr.uk/gallery_view.php?user=2&folderid=none

Posted by Bob Bowen: Fri Aug 29th, 2014 07:41

6^th Post

I have lots of text files from obscure WP systems and have found LibreOffice another free download works well.

____________________
Bob Bowen

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