Animorphs ebook correction

[CNash]

Hey there, it's me again... back from "hiatus", lol

Anyway, I'm working on tidying up the text versions of the books - fixing things like bad paragraphing, missing speech marks, extraneous line breaks, and the dreaded "Urn"! I've got six or seven done so far, just working on them in my spare time. I can wait until I'm done with the whole series (which may take a while), or upload them here as and when I finish a couple. What do you think?

[CNash]

Don't know how much of a response I'll get from this, but here goes.

See, the thing with most of the PDFs is that when they were scanned, the chapter breaks were omitted. I dislike this, as it's not true to the original composition of the published books. But for a lot of them, I don't have any way to fix this, as I no longer have hard copies of most of the original books.

So I'm appealing to those who do still have hard copies. Would you be able to help me reinsert the chapter breaks? All I'd need, at the very least, is a basic table of the first line of each chapter. If you can help, please reply or PM me!

I've attached a sample of what I've been working on, just so you can see what I've been doing - it's book #1, in TXT format, cleaned up from the PDF editions. This one had chapter breaks already; I'd estimate that about 25 of the books need their chapter breaks reinserted. Books 1-12, Megamorphs 1 and The Andalite Chronicles are already done.

[Amauril]

How do you handle emphasis in your TXT files? Do you just drop it, or do you wrap it in asterisks or something?

[CNash]

I drop it. I realise that it's not the best solution, and it isn't "true to the original composition of the published books" as I said above (which makes me a bit of a hypocrite, I know...) but plain text isn't really designed to convey emphasis; using asterisks (etc.) just makes it look ugly and cluttered, and I'd need a different system for each type of emphasis, which would necessitate some kind of key. There are some unique situations where using a wraparound character is necessary; for example, the Leeran's thought-speak in book #18, and other exotic types of telepathy... I'm very happy that general thought-speak is represented by angled brackets!

Basically, my goal for this project is to have the series in a set of readable plain text files with an internally-consistent style of editing. The major advantage of plain text is that pretty much every computer platform in existence has some way of viewing it natively; while eBook readers supporting ePub are becoming ubiquitous, computers still require additional software to view them. And there are some platforms that don't have ePub-reading capabilities at all.

I have the bad habit of neglecting this project for months at a time; this is usually due to having too many real-life concerns to devote time to it! However, the advent of the ePub tidy-up project (which took place a few months ago, while I had the project "on hiatus") means that my job is now significantly easier than when I started it. For example, all of the ePubs have chapter break information, so my earlier request is now no longer valid! So far, I have around 30 of the books fully tidied up, although not always in sequence; once I have 01-25 complete, I'll post everything I've got up here.