My fiancée got a Kindle for Christmas, and is interested in re-reading and catching up on UF works (she read a bunch of them a number of years ago).

The Kindle is terrible at displaying 80-column ASCII text, though, and the various automated conversion tools mangle the text to a greater or lesser extent (particularly song lyrics and credits).

So has anyone made any progress in converting the stories (particularly Symphony of the Sword and related works)?

What you do is this: Go into the Options menu, and click Screen Rotation. Change it to one of the sideways options (I opt for the one with the buttons to the right, but I'm right handed). Open a text file (I used the first part of Symphony 1), open the Options menu again, and click Change Font Size (you can also change screen rotation in this menu, if you haven't already).

Now, you have a couple options. You can go to the third font size on the left and the Condensed typeface, the second size with the Regular typeface, or Sans-Serif with size 3. I have yet to read through a full Eyrie piece with any of these settings, but they seem to display correctly at the moment. You may encounter a broken line or two.

As for modifying the files so they can be read 'normally', the only thing you have to do is remove the line breaks; your Kindle will take care of the rest. Slightly tedious, but not impossible.

AFAIK, there's a rule about formats, namely "They don't give a crap about keepng up with the newest ereader format, and 80 column text is good enough"

Lemme see what I can BASH (well, python, really) together.

ETA: Alright, so it looks like the big hurdle is going to be actually formatting the files into html formatting, which I don't see an easy way to automate (well, I could script it fairly easily, but then I'd have to go and clean up everywhere that it didn't match up perfectly).

Then again, I've got a bunch of free time, and wanted a ruby learning project, so...

--
-Pasha
What was that feeling again?
Oh yes.
-Rage-

I have a Kindle DX and a DXG. What I do for preformatted text is a simple copy-paste into LibreOffice followed by an export to PDF. The key is setting the page size correctly and the margins to zero. From what I've found from a quick Google search, a good page size for Kindle 3 (6" display) is 5.49x7.33 inches. Set the page size and margins, then copy-paste in the text. Select all and set the font to a monospaced font. I use Liberation Sans Mono Bold; YMMV. Set the font size just small enough to eliminate line wrap. Save it off so you have a copy, then export to PDF. Copy that PDF over to your Kindle and enjoy.

A trick for the smaller Kindles is to set Landscape mode for the base document. The greater width means you can use a larger font size without wrapping text.

In most cases I took the original text files to Word, formatted them so they lay out nicely, and then ran them through Calibre to convert to MOBI.

I do admit to making a few format changes in line with my own reading preferences, such as (among others) text bracketed by non-alpha characters used to provide some sort of emphasis to the text became italicized text without the non-alpha characters.

Jeanne

	Jeanne Hedge http://www.jhedge.com
"Believe me, if I have to go the rest of my life without companionship, knowing myself won't be a problem." -- Gabrielle of Potadeia

Did someone mention regular expressions?

Okay, I saw this thread, and I thought that I'd take a crack at an ebook conversion. Since I got a Nook for Christmas, I'm a little familiar with the EPUB format. And since that is basically just XHTML+CSS (wait, when did EPUB 3 come out... okay, EPUB 2 then), an epub version seems like something that could be put together fairly easily.

So I wrote a script to convert the text files to HTML, using a mess of regular expressions. (Or a quagmire of regular expressions? What's the collective noun for regexes?) It's doing a pretty good job of guessing what things are, but it's not perfect yet. But most of the important stuff is working, like 2-column credits and centered headers. And most of the heavy lifting of the formatting is in the CSS, and that isn't perfect yet.

But Fulcrum of Fate is pretty readable on my Nook right now, despite not having a working table of contents. I'll let you know when I'm a little farther along.

In order to do that, I wrote a tool (Text-Transformation Language) in QB64, so that I could write a re-usable "script" to move Gryphon's ASCII format into .HTML, and then I could use something like "Calibre" to move that HTML into MOBI and EPUB.

You can find Text-Transformation Language here:
http://dustinian.com/pg/texttransformationlanguage

You can find an explanation of Text-Transformation language, including a "sample" script that it written expressly for moving Eyrie stories into HTML here:
http://www.qb64.net/forum/index.php?topic=4502.0

I meant to get more posted by now, but my wife and I are expecting, and our due date was literally yesterday. I'm still on pins-and-needles waiting for my daughter (our first-born).

I have a 1.6 of TTL in-progress that fixes a few bugs, but if you compile TTL in QB64... the current eyrie sample script has run on all the stories that I've tried.

I've made an attempt in the past using php code (with partial success--BOfH stories came out fine, but not SotS.) Now, since I want to re-familarize myself with C#, I'm taking a working mini-Notepad program I made for a course project and kludging in an internal find&replace system for HTML editing. I intend to improve on the interface for that in the future, but this'll give me something to chew on during Canadian apres ski through next week. It will, of course, be a self-contained EXE easily run anywhere, so I can one-off multiple pages and store them on my website for you guys to stick elsewhere as you like.

I simply saved the 7 txt files of WL into a single batch and shoved it through the above today, just out of curiosity. It isn't... horrible. about a 1/3 way through Battle 1, it italicised EVERYTHING. But readable.

4/6 Now that I've actually read through the output from above, some notes. The odd italics issue appears to be an artifact related to Ben's tags around music cues. Causes the italics to turn on/off at odd intervals. But otherwise, it handled the actual text blocking fairly well.

Brian

uBook reader, my go-to software of choice for, well, reading, isn't stable on Android yet.

This is the only mention I will make of iOS devices.

--
Kokuten Daysleeper
RCW #13013
(Insert Witticism Here)