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kip_w.
I keep looking for this one book I saw at the motel we stayed at when we moved here: The Roger DeCoverley Papers, a collection of pieces from The Spectator about this squire fellow. I've even thought of going back and seeing if they'd sell it to me, because the used book stores here don't have it. (Oh, sure, I could buy it online, but do I? Do I??) So I finally gave in and downloaded one from Project Gutenburg and formatted it for my iPod "notes" function. I did this in what seemed to me a more clever and faster way than I have in the past.
First, I looked at it in Notebook (TextEdit, for you Macsters). There were line returns after each short, short line. Next, I took it into QuarkXPress, where I set up a document in half-sized pages with two columns and let it flow to see how many pages it wanted. The filesize was 168k, and since you get just under 4k per "notes" page, I wanted to get it into 45 to 50 pages. I did the usual find-and-replaces to accomplish the following:
• changing all hard returns to soft returns
• changing two soft returns in a row to two hard returns -- I decided I wanted a space between paras
• changing remaining soft returns to spaces, so those lines would flow together into paragraphs
• putting a space at the beginning of each paragraph just for format niceness
Then I started highlighting text and exporting it to .txt files in a folder. I named each one dc0##- followed by the number of the article (with an initial that revealed whether it was written by Addison, Steele, or Budgell). I had to break up articles across pages, so I used hyphens to indicate whether it was continuing. Work it out yourself; it seems silly to take the time to explain this part.
I closed everything on the desktop and kept the Quark file and the folder I was putting files into open, so I could alt-tab between the two places. If the file showed as 5k or more, I took out lines. If it showed as 4k or less, I put lines in -- arrowing up and down in the Quark file to highlight more or fewer lines (making sure to end between sentences). If the filename was highlighted in the folder, the exact size showed at the bottom, and after a while, I knew that a column line was about .03k, so I could more quickly get near the limit of my allotment. If I had to break up a paragraph (as so often happened with these wordy fellows), the first line in the next file had no space before. On the few occasions I had to break up a speech, I put a quote mark in square brackets at the start of the file.
When I was done, I made a table of contents that gave the title for each number. It took me a couple of hours, which is less than some of the jobs I've taken on have taken. I need to get back to the Gilbert & Sullivan plays, but they're a mess, with too many little paragraphs here, and too many speeches jammed together there.
So I read the first couple of pieces last night in bed. Not too hilarious so far, but at least (unlike other humor I've read from the late 18th and early 19th century) you don't need to know who was famous then, and why, and what kind of hat they wore and what sort of dog they had in order to make any sense of it.
.
I keep looking for this one book I saw at the motel we stayed at when we moved here: The Roger DeCoverley Papers, a collection of pieces from The Spectator about this squire fellow. I've even thought of going back and seeing if they'd sell it to me, because the used book stores here don't have it. (Oh, sure, I could buy it online, but do I? Do I??) So I finally gave in and downloaded one from Project Gutenburg and formatted it for my iPod "notes" function. I did this in what seemed to me a more clever and faster way than I have in the past.
First, I looked at it in Notebook (TextEdit, for you Macsters). There were line returns after each short, short line. Next, I took it into QuarkXPress, where I set up a document in half-sized pages with two columns and let it flow to see how many pages it wanted. The filesize was 168k, and since you get just under 4k per "notes" page, I wanted to get it into 45 to 50 pages. I did the usual find-and-replaces to accomplish the following:
• changing all hard returns to soft returns
• changing two soft returns in a row to two hard returns -- I decided I wanted a space between paras
• changing remaining soft returns to spaces, so those lines would flow together into paragraphs
• putting a space at the beginning of each paragraph just for format niceness
Then I started highlighting text and exporting it to .txt files in a folder. I named each one dc0##- followed by the number of the article (with an initial that revealed whether it was written by Addison, Steele, or Budgell). I had to break up articles across pages, so I used hyphens to indicate whether it was continuing. Work it out yourself; it seems silly to take the time to explain this part.
I closed everything on the desktop and kept the Quark file and the folder I was putting files into open, so I could alt-tab between the two places. If the file showed as 5k or more, I took out lines. If it showed as 4k or less, I put lines in -- arrowing up and down in the Quark file to highlight more or fewer lines (making sure to end between sentences). If the filename was highlighted in the folder, the exact size showed at the bottom, and after a while, I knew that a column line was about .03k, so I could more quickly get near the limit of my allotment. If I had to break up a paragraph (as so often happened with these wordy fellows), the first line in the next file had no space before. On the few occasions I had to break up a speech, I put a quote mark in square brackets at the start of the file.
When I was done, I made a table of contents that gave the title for each number. It took me a couple of hours, which is less than some of the jobs I've taken on have taken. I need to get back to the Gilbert & Sullivan plays, but they're a mess, with too many little paragraphs here, and too many speeches jammed together there.
So I read the first couple of pieces last night in bed. Not too hilarious so far, but at least (unlike other humor I've read from the late 18th and early 19th century) you don't need to know who was famous then, and why, and what kind of hat they wore and what sort of dog they had in order to make any sense of it.
.
