It seems that the interface between Volkwriter, my old software, and Word Perfect, is not so great if you have the # symbol in the text—it erases paragraphs, in WP. And guess what I’d used in VW for a spacer. FORTUNATELY, MS Word turns out not to do that. So I’m going to have to go through with both processors open and carefully transfer bits of the file as MS Word sees it into WP, which may be a bit of an argument between the two. I just love having to do this. But Word is the world’s messiest program when it comes to converting text for e-books. It leaves literally pages and pages of worthless code all over a document.
SO cover me. I’m going in.
Have you looked at OpenOffice.org? A low cost (free) alternative to Office.
I am *so* with you on that one. Even though the far superior WordPerfect was the original law office word processor, it’s been replaced by that heinous Word. Much of the non-word processing software uses it, so I’ve got to have it.
I don’t have the transfer from Volkswriter problem, but i do hate how “cheeky” Word gets – no matter how much time I spend mucking around in setups and templates, it changes all of my careful formatting, on some whim of its own. And heaven forbid it sneaks onto the internet – stealth upgrades! (And yes, I’ve changed those settings too!Doesn’t seem to matter, b/c Word knows more about what I want to write than I do, apparently.)
Oh, so that’s why the legal services folk I often do low-income advocacy work with (still) use WordPerfect. I always wondered. But even they send out most of their attachments in the evil Word these days.
Don’t you know MicroSoft’s motto is ::Microsoft knows better than you”? I hate their auto-formats!
When I was making e-books for a living I used something called UpCast.
Now, I didn’t have to pay for that license, I was just the code-monkey. But it was pretty nice. I don’t know how much it would cost, but you can get a free demo version if you haven’t already looked it over at: http://www.upcast.de
–M
I was so thrilled when Win7 stealth-updated and restarted my computer when I’d left it on because I had an unsaved [because it was unresolved] very large genealogy datafile up. I could have bitten nails.
I have tried OpenOffice, but it’s a whole new learning curve; and thank you both for the suggestions. I did find my copy of Word, and bullied it into converting to ‘plain text’, then changed the font, changed the line width, saved as early Word [which has fewer junk-bits] then converted to an early WP, then to a later one, and I have now used WP’s powerful Display the Codes function and its code-sensitive Search and Replace to get in and kick it in the slats. So we are doing pretty well now. I have a lot of words glued together, but I am doing a rewrite and improvement on the books, so that’s not a problem. I can make WP do a lot of things with hind-brain-driven keystrokes and a sure knowledge how to do it—if I can get make sure I’ve got all the text, and thank goodness, I’ve got it—without having to send me raidin’ parties out to cut out a fine pirate file of me own work!
Thank you all, I think I’ve got it!
Verily, thou art a Nerd Goddess! I am trying to remember if I dropped it all onto a unix box and did regexp… I don’t think so.
And yesterday, being Talk Like a Pirate Day, would have been the day to pirate your own book! AVAST!
Er … why do you have Win set to auto update without a prompt? Auto download, fine, but I always set the actual update to prompt so that I can do it when it’s at my convenience.
The setting had gotten changed. How it got changed is spooky, and I do so hope that’s not one of the things an Update can meddle with.
Er. Ahem. I mean “Nerd” in the most complimentary possible terms, as I are one myself…
😆 I am, with WP: I can use that program half-asleep and upside down: I have even used it without a display, to recover an essential file in a meltdown. But unfortunately it was bought by an Evil Overlord about a decade ago, and I live in fear one day they will make it so helpful it’s useless!
I have only done the No Display thing once, your WP Fu is Awesome indeed.
Eegads! This might be a job for that faithful programmer’s friend, the Regular Expression. Unfortunately, Regular Expressions are not all that easy to learn and there’s not a really good program that provide the functionality with any word processor. If you can save the Word files as plain text, you might be able use an editor like BBEdit to do the nasty bits of the pattern replacement. Open Office does have a steep learning curve for doing advanced tasks and its documentation has not been all that good for me. That said, I do like the system and not the least because it’s available at no cost and runs all the OSes I use. I had to ban Windows from my household due to security issues and the fact that one installation repeatedly ate its own registry for no reason I could ever discover.
If you’re looking for a Windows based editor that does Regular Expressions well (and has excellent documentation to go with them), try TextEdit (textedit.com) – it doesn’t do formatting, it doesn’t do images and fonts or other frills. It does to bare text REALLY WELL. Big files, little files, lots of files at once. Has autokey type capabilities as well, so I would think could function well in *old* WP format (with the codes entered as bare text in the file, XLM-ish – I confess the last WP version I used was 3.0 I think on an ancient DOS box). I have edited multi-million line text files using this program just fine.
At the risk of having Large Solid Objects thrown at me:
I find that for some things, nothing but MS Word will do the job: mostly things involving tabs or paragraph marks, which OpenOffice, bless its heart, doesn’t do well if it does them at all.
OO, however, will open really large files just fine. (I opened a 20-megabyte spreadsheet the other night. Don’t try it with Excel; it chokes.) And the files are a lot smaller when you save them in their (XML, I think) format.
The one thing WP has that nobody else has, to my knowledge, is Reveal Codes, which opens a separate screen and lets you manipulate the code pieces that are embedded in the text. This means if you’ve got something happening that seems totally irrational, you can look directly at the code, which appears as a command in a box, eg [HRt] in a small box = hard return—-and not only can you see it, you can erase it, or even run a global command on that situation. You can also watch what code is being inserted by particular keystrokes. You can use Search and Replace to match codes, or to replace or insert codes. It also translates far more cleanly into HTML than, say, Word. If you look at the coding on a Word document, you find an incredible lot of code bits which just do not want to be erased by any process Word can do, and which can cause an amazing amount of trouble in file conversion. WP can reach into that spaghetti and take it out. There’s nothing that appears in WP that cannot be gotten at via either the Format screen or the Reveal Codes window. It does not, however, support Unicode, at last report, and this is why it is not really a worldwide software.
If you do a lot of text manipulation, or conversion from one form to another, I do recommend any vintage of WP.
I have found that Atlantis (http://www.atlantiswordprocessor.com/en/) converts to epub without a fuss, regardless of where the file originated… Promise, no stake in the company – I found it by search last year when I wanted to convert some big documents for reading on my phone 🙂
I’ve been using IWork on my Mac a lot. While it wouldn’t be useful for transferring from Volkswriter, as a writing tool it’s nice.
As to Word, well, I would rather use Notepad.
*Giggling* It’s nice to hear of someone without a last name of Gates being referred to as the Evil Emperor!
You made my day! I’ll be smiling anytime I think of this today.
Wicked evil Word user who also prefers Notepad for items that I want to copy/paste into an email.
One sadness: it used to be that the Open Office on our library computers could open and read Word files. Your formatting might suffer, but you could at least open them. The new Word, which saves files in the .docx format, stymies Open Office. It frustrates any number of people who want to print out homework, etc.
Isn’t that charming of Microsoft? It is a reason for retaining an older edition of Word.
I despise .docx and the new, PC Word program that uses it, but am having to upgrade on my home computer because so many of my students now send me .docx files which I can’t open on my old, Mac Word version. I’m hoping that the organization the newest Mac version of Word is not the horror that is the PC version.
you can save them in the older format – I do that, as I have plenty of recipients of files who don’t have the latest Word
I miss Macromedia HomeSite as a text editor, for web pages or anything else plain text. Heck, I miss the old Borland Turbo text editor, which used many WordStar-like commands.
I use Word because I have to. I cannot stand the new Office 2007 and later. I stayed with Office 2003. I have used OpenOffice, and it looks like I’ll use it more.
Word is horrible at converting to HTML, even with “filtered” settings. Converting to anything else for ebook production, I can only imagine the pain.
At this point, I’d love a better word processor, one that, you know, actually lets me process words.
I’m going to have to get used to Adobe Illustrator. I finally got a new book on using it, as the old book was not helping at all. — I used Macromedia Freehand, but Adobe bought and killed it, Illustrator will not import files well at all, and the new Illustrator interface is…counter-intuitive is putting it mildly. — And I’m an experienced computer user. — I’m not as Luddite or afraid of change as this makes me sound.
The last couple of rounds of changes from Microsoft and Adobe have, in my opinion, been unproductive towards simplifying how users, new or old, use the programs.
End Rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled wackiness. 🙂
I’ll look forward to the Rusalka ebooks. I haven’t yet read them in print. (I ordered used copies a few weeks ago.)
Hey, fellow Word-haters. Found out something very useful at Smashwords.com. He has a styleguide for prepping files for Smashwords. In it, he tells how (a) to reveal codes in Word and (b)turn off the auto-format that puts in all that crappy code.
To activate Word’s Show/Hide: The show/hide feature is designated by the pilcrow (reverse P thingy) in the toolbar. If it’s not in the toolbar, you can usually find it in Tools:Options:View and under Formatting Marks click “all”
To turn off Word’s Auto correct As You Type and AutoFormat features. If you have them engaged, Word will try to guess what type of formatting you want based on how you write the paragraph (isn’t that just special?)
To turn off in earlier versions, go to Tools:AutoCorrect, click on the “Auto Format As You Type” tab and then uncheck most of the boxes, and then click on the “AutoFormat” tab and uncheck the four boxes un “apply”
in Word 2007, click on the round Microsoft Office button (upper left) then click “Word Options” then click “proofing” then click the button at the right for “autocorrect Options.”
Won’t make me like the program, but at least it should help those who have to use the blame thing.
Microsoft and Adobe have to justify charging you the earth for the new versions, so they put far too many bells and whistles into them. 🙁 I’m dealing with a newer version of Photoshop currently – can’t find all my favourite things half the time – like making a contact sheet! took me reading up on google to find out how to do it!
I have had the “Privlage” of learning and using 5 different word processors in the last 25 or so years. The first was the IBM dedicated Displaywriter (before PCs were available) followed by Displaywriter for PC, Volkswriter, Word Perfect and Word. Volkswriter was the easiest to use but limited in what it could do. Word Perfect was versatile and easy to use, so naturally Microsoft had to drive it into oblivion so we would all be stuck with Word. Word is the worst and most frustrating and mediocre of all the programs I have used. Intuit is just as bad as Microsoft. Parsons Technology had a great easy to use tax program for half the price of Turbotax, so Intuit bought Parsons and did away with the competing product, and then raised the price on Turbotax.
When transferring content from one WP to another, it is invariably, to the point of always, simpler to cut and paste the content into a plain text editor, so as to lose any formatting, before pasting or importing into your preferred WP. You then apply whatever styles are needed. The problem with the # symbol, is that is used to hide/differentiate comments in computer configuration files, from the text that the executing application utilises. Very popular in Linux and Unix.
An excellent WP comes with the Softmaker Office 2010 suite. It has very useful DTP features. Is vastly easier than Word to use, is inexpensive, and has a proper *.pdf export option. You can download the 30 day, fully functional tryout from their website.