Elaborate Formatting of Free Online Book Files: Anyone Else Do This?

B

Bushrod

New Member
Location
Vero Beach, Florida
My main hobby is finding free book (text) files online (Gutenberg, Internet Archive, Wikisource, etc.) and then formatting them elaborately to make them easy to read (bad eyes) and beautiful to look at. Using lots and lots of different fonts, colors and imported image files both as backgrounds, watermarks and decorations. Have accumulated over four thousand of these decorated books now, and I only keep the ones I love.

I use LibreOffice as my text editor, which seems adequate for my purposes. Moved over from Word years and years ago. There are literally millions and millions of books to choose from available free and legally online. I do like Kindle books but the Exchequer is limited and copyright books have limited scope for expressive visual adaptation which can only be done with text files.

I like mainly history of all kinds, old travel books, polar exploration, sea stories, old mysteries, and diaries and journals. They all adapt well to my kind of visual editing. I get my fonts from all the free font websites and my images (of which I've collected tens of thousands) from pretty much everywhere online over the years. To give you an idea, many of those images are of different kinds of paper and fabric, to be used as backgrounds. Plain white book backgrounds hurt my eyes. It's also fun to use dark backgrounds and light type. You can really adjust everything to the kind of book you're formatting.

Anyone else out there doing this kind of thing?
 

I really loved the TV show "The Expanse" in its first three seasons. Seasons 4 through 6 are fine, but don't have the same impact for me.

I like it enough however that I tracked down the scripts for all episodes. Those turned out to be a formatting mess, with a lot of typos and spelling errors and completely incorrect words here and there.

I wrote a program to sanitize these based on a set of rules for replacing lots of words and phrases and names that were messed up, and re-paragraphing and correcting punctuation. Each time I find a new issue I can add or modify a rule.

The "sanitizer" gets run by another program that creates a database. It makes a fresh database, then runs the sanitizer for each episode, importing the cleaned result.

I added another feature that imports still photos that I've downloaded for each episode. These are mostly "episode banners" introducing each episode but also some larger "interstitials" that go where I manually mark each script.

Another program is the "viewer" for the database. It gives a tree view on the left for each season and episode, displaying the cleaned up script and images to the right. It can also accept keywords or phases to search for, and jump into each script where I can click "next, next, next" to find exactly what I want.

So as I find issues in the text I can adjust and regenerate the database with one click.

This was super-handy when I was active on a discussion board about the show, especially while it was in its first run. The show is a lot of political intrigue based on prior history with several interleaved perspectives. This database makes it easier to go back and find clues and pivotal people and events and "who knew what when" without rewatching everything over and over. Though by now I have done that as well.
 

officerripley said:
I have LibreOffice and I didn't even know it was possible to do this. How cool! Do you then read the books on your computer or tablet maybe?
Click to expand...
I have to read them on my laptop. My phone is too small and I don't have a tablet. HOWEVER, I do have the LibreOffice app for android so theoretically I could view them on the phone. I also see no reason why one wouldn't be able to view them on a tablet. But since the files are large for LO, I'd only be comfortable with reasonably powerful machines for purposes of speed.
 
dilettante said:
I really loved the TV show "The Expanse" in its first three seasons. Seasons 4 through 6 are fine, but don't have the same impact for me.

I like it enough however that I tracked down the scripts for all episodes. Those turned out to be a formatting mess, with a lot of typos and spelling errors and completely incorrect words here and there.

I wrote a program to sanitize these based on a set of rules for replacing lots of words and phrases and names that were messed up, and re-paragraphing and correcting punctuation. Each time I find a new issue I can add or modify a rule.

The "sanitizer" gets run by another program that creates a database. It makes a fresh database, then runs the sanitizer for each episode, importing the cleaned result.

I added another feature that imports still photos that I've downloaded for each episode. These are mostly "episode banners" introducing each episode but also some larger "interstitials" that go where I manually mark each script.

Another program is the "viewer" for the database. It gives a tree view on the left for each season and episode, displaying the cleaned up script and images to the right. It can also accept keywords or phases to search for, and jump into each script where I can click "next, next, next" to find exactly what I want.

So as I find issues in the text I can adjust and regenerate the database with one click.

This was super-handy when I was active on a discussion board about the show, especially while it was in its first run. The show is a lot of political intrigue based on prior history with several interleaved perspectives. This database makes it easier to go back and find clues and pivotal people and events and "who knew what when" without rewatching everything over and over. Though by now I have done that as well.
Click to expand...
Very neat. I'm very pre-programming myself
officerripley said:
What are some sites you get fonts from? (I had a great site for fonts but didn't bookmark it and now don't remember the name.)
Click to expand...
Google fonts, 1001 Fonts, DaFont, Icons For Everything, FlatIcons.
 

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