[NTLK] Correct text file encoding for Paperback book making

[Dan]

Hello Nic,
Well have you tried Newton Press?  It may do the proper formatting and
what you see is what you get.  It is on UNNA.org.  Also Press allows to
make books using the full screen for the different models and in
portrait or landscape mode.  A warning, press does have bugs on occasion
and don't do a lot of text editing it in.  But rather the actual text
files.  This way if your press file (the book source file) should become
corrupt you can just dump it back into press easily with minimal editing
(if any).  If you still have problems with press, then you will need to
change your encoding.  But the problem you are seeing is the "Smart
Quotes" or "curly quotes".  The ways to remove this vary with the word
processor, but there is usually a preference setting.  And under worse
case do a search and replace for all quotes, should only take a few
seconds.  And actually changing the quotes in the source file might be
easier than the encoding.  That is what I do when I import text into works.

Also note that Press won't make a automatic table of contents.  But
search still works inside books on the newt.  So you can just search for
 say "chapter 1"  If the source text file does not name chapters, you
might consider adding them (or something unique to search for to
separate areas if you don't want to take the time to actually create a
table of contents).

One warning, Press does not work on 64 bit windows.  The only way around
this is to run a virtual machine using say Virtual PC and install
another OS to it.  Windows 98, windows 2000, or XP.  For this I would
suggest windows 2000 or XP as windows 98 is slower when run under
Virtual PC.  However windows 98 works better with Newton Connection
Utilities because of this.  If you are doing serial/cable transfers of
your books you may wish to use windows 98, that is what I use.  The
slight sluggishness of the windows 98 VM will also likely be fine for
Press as well if you are not doing a lot of editing inside of Press
itself.  But if you want/need more speed with Press use windows 2000 or
XP VM.



-Dan

On 5/30/2011 10:35 AM, Nic Malone wrote:
> I'm trying to use my new MP as an eBook reader. I've managed to get books
> converted into text files using Calibre then Paperback Bookmaker to produce
> PKG files. Having worked out that each book must be split into sub-1MB PKG
> files to avoid memory errors on the MP, I now have the problem of sqaure
> characters and other odd characters replacing any punctuation in the text
> (eg " ! , ' etc). Makes it hard to read pages with a lot of dialog. I think
> this is down to me using the wrong encoding when saving the text (.txt)
> file. I think they are saving in UTF-8. Does anyone know what text encoding
> is best with Paperback?
> 
> PS I dont use Newton Books as its failure to fill more than half the screen
> is too annoying.
> 
> Cheers, Nic