Nicholas (nwhyte) wrote,
Nicholas
nwhyte

Format irritation

I generally read e-books on my Blackberry, converting them from PDF, HTML or word processor format with Mobipocket's free converter. As mentioned previously, this sometimes proves problematic with PDFs. I hit another such problem reading Peter Watts' story, "The Island", which got chopped about quite seriously by the process. One example - I encountered this jumble of words:
A red
The chimp has forgotten to care dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. named it DHF428, for reasons I've long since about.
Which it turns out originally read:
A red
dwarf glowers dimly at the center of the Tank. The chimp has
named it DHF428, for reasons I've long since forgotten to care
about.
I have no idea if this is due to the PDF taking up the text from the original wordprocessor incorrectly, or if it is Mobipocket choking on the conversion (which it manages OK nine times out of ten) to treat as sequential the last three words of the next three lines. It does show the wisdom of making such texts available in a variety of formats - kudos to Charlie Stross for actually providing "Palimpsest" in the .prc format that my gadget can read.
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