I’m still toying with the idea of writing a “What If?” novel about John Lennon, but I’m stuck for ideas about what would have changed. One idea is to write a “Butterfly Effect” story resulting in Chapman’s suicide, therefore Lennon’s survival.
Sunday, October 10th, 2004
Daily Archive
I am wearing my Adelaide High School “Non Scholae Sed Vitae” lanyard, and a woman just wanted to know if she could buy one, as she is an Old Scholar.
I found a heap of Palm TEXt REAd documents, but I don’t like the way they appear as (Doc) in PalmReader. So I wrote a script to convert them to PML, the format used by DropBook to make PNRd PPrs documents.
Basically, I found that on OS X the translation of txt2pdbdoc -d (decode back into text) wasn’t so good; a heap of characters needed to be changed.
I did have them all listed here, but if I edit them, ecto F*cks up the encoding!
I also changed the === to an 80% horizontal line.
The [[[ - ]]] blocks were indented, and a footer line [* <Text>] is indented also.
I assumed the only use of a / was for italics, and _ for underlining.
I also assume the first non-empty, non === line is the Title, and the Author line starts with By. I use this info to create a ‘Title Page’.
The tricky bit was getting the Chapter Heading sorted, I needed to break the text into a list of strings to do this, and scan through. This slows the script down a lot, but it still works okay. I might profile it a bit and see where the slowdown is.
Anyway, here’s the latest version I’ve uploaded: txt2pml.py
I plan to make a version to process Project Gutenberg texts, but that’s on the back burner.