Archive for the ‘Tutorial’ Category
In my last post we had a look at how to deal with text files, probably the most basic types of files, with the story “Tobermory” downloaded from the Gutenberg site.
At the end I referred to the PDF file and many, many ebooks or electronic books created sometimes for commercial purposes or informational purposes are provided as PDF files.
PDF simply means Portable Document Format and it was created by the company Adobe – most famous for the Photoshop programme.
The resulting files are small and can combine text and graphics in a convenient format.
Many sites will tell you to read them using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
First of all I want to be quite clear that this site Freebooks Plus is about promoting free online books, free off line books and free audio books. It’s not about attacking commercial companies.
Many commercial companies such as Adobe provide free resources of excellent quality.
My difficulty with the Adobe Acrobat reader is that it’s a very large download, it gets updated frequently with even more features that are not always useful for our purposes and there’s some danger of it taking over your browser and your PDF files unless your careful with it.
But by all means if you want to get a completely free and totally reliable PDF reader, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is perfectly good.
However readers of Freebooks Plus might like to consider other options.
You might like to support the Open Source Software movement, or perhaps just want to have much smaller downloads which use fewer resources.
So, if you go to my resource page you can see a list of several alternative PDF readers.
One of the most important points from where I am is if there is a portable version. By portable here I mean, a version of the software that can be carried around on a pen drive often called a memory stick or a USB flash drive.
The reason for this is that if you travel a lot you can take most of your software with you. You can plug into the USB port of any computer in the world and you can quickly use you programmes without leaving any files or information on the host computer.
Pen drives and alternatives such as flash memory cards are getting larger in capacity but it still makes sense to have the smallest programmes available, both to download and to store.
I suggest going to the resources page and trying out the different PDF readers to see which one suits you best.
One more point perhaps is that all these readers do a good job of reading PDF files but not all give you any option for writing onto PDF files.
This is not strictly necessary for reading freebooks but it might be a factor for you.
From the portability point of view I favour the Sumatra and Foxit readers as they are small and seem stable.
The Sumatra Reader is an Open Source product which means that it isn’t a cut down version of a commercial product and it should work across several operating systems.
So let’s choose a PDF reader and then get ready to obtain, prepare and print a free book in the PDF format.
One final point, this blog is all about legal free books.
I can’t stress that enough.
Some PDF book creators may have decided to block facilities such as copying the contents or printing it.
I suggest we respect the authors rights and concentrate on freebooks that don’t have too many restrictions.
If you found this post interesting please don’t be shy about leaving your comments.
I want to share information on freebooks with as many people as possible.
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Until next time….
Now let’s get on with formatting the first Free Book – Tobermory and preparing it for print
Recommended Resources: – on Free Resources Page:
Abiword
EditPad Lite
Textfixer
So you downloaded your text and selected the story called Tobermory and copied and pasted into your word processor or text editor. And all is fine.
Well, there’s nothing exactly wrong but probably your text is formatted with short lines all ending with a carriage return which you might be able to see. Like this:
This, of course is necessary if you want to preserve the lines of text like a poem or a list.
But for a Story like Tobermory I’d rather go a step further and get rid of those carriage returns and have the text properly arranged in in paragraphs.
Now this blog is called freebooksplus so I’m going to recommend free tools. I’ll say right now that if you want to reformat the text on your computer, the easiest way is to use Microsoft Word which will easily replace the carriage returns.
Unfortunately the free word processors have no easy way of doing this.
Still, let’s do it all online:
Select the whole text you want to reformat (control+a) and then cut it (control+x)
Then log onto the cool site at Textfixer.
Paste (control+v) your text into the first box and your text will be miraculously cleaned up and reformatted. Like this:
Now just copy and paste into your word processor and it’s all done.
Choose your font and page format and you’re ready to print. I like to use Arial Narrow font and make the page margins a little narrower than the default.
I also like to add some headers and/or footers.
Then you can print out your story.
Now it’s time to get on with finding free books and deciding what to do with them. I’m going to begin with E-texts from Project Gutenberg which are produced as standard ASCII files. Don’t worry if you don’t know what that means as it should be clear later.
First of all let’s find a book. We all have our favourite authors and one of mine is Saki.
Saki is the pen name or pseudonym of Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916).
In his relatively short life he was born in Burma, brought up in North Devon by two aunts, returned to Burma to join the military police but left because of ill health. In London he worked as a story writer and journalist before enlisting in the army in 1914 when he was killed in France.
Still he had time to write the short stories which made him famous and one of my favourites is Tobermory.
There’s no point in writing a long review of a short story – if you don’t know it, you’ll have the chance to read it yourself. All I’m telling you now is that Tobermory is an extremely intelligent cat who has the power of speech. He doens’t suffer fools gladly and speaks his mind which makes him a lot of enemies.
To get the text of this story follow the link to the website of Project Gutenburgh a huge repository of E-texts for you to download and read at your leisure and pleasure.
(Legal note – on this site I will never advocate breaking the copyright laws so make sure you always read the terms and conditions carefully before you download anything ),
Tobermory is part of the Collection called “The Chronicles of Clovis”. You can find it by going to the Project Gutenburgh site and typing “Tobermory” in the Title box in Search:
Here’s the link: (click on the picture)
Click GO and you should reach the page for: Etext-No. 3688 “The Chronicles of Clovis” which includes the story “Tobermory”.
Download the text to your computer and then you can read it in your favourite text editor or word processor.
OK that’s all there is to it?
Or is it? You might like to format the text and print it out. We’ll discuss this later in the next part of the tutorial.
Now download the text onto your computer
