Posts Tagged ‘download’
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
