Scrivener, Word, and Tracked Changes

So it's not a very closely guarded secret that I'm working on getting Looking Glass and Irreconcilable Differences back in print. (Soon. Soon.) My modern toolchain for these old books (for those keeping score) is: Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> Epub -> Jutoh -> Epub, Mobi, and Epub for ibooks. For the hardcopy, it's Nisus Writer -> RTF -> Scrivener -> RTF -> rtf2latex->Tex->XeLaTex -> PDF. This sounds like more work than it really is. I have the RTF manuscripts, the same ones the Flying Pen Press typeset was done from. I imported them both into Jutoh years ago when I stopped making ebooks by hand. I imported them into Scrivener for all the modern maintenance, mostly cleaning up weird typos that seemed to crop up.

Fast forward to a few days ago. While finishing up the ebook version of Looking Glass, I decided to go through it one more time with the Jutoh spell checker. (Jutoh's spell checker is awful. Slow, primitive, based on ispell or aspell (I forget which), and Jutoh likes to hide the cursor permanently when you've been spell checking a while. It also crashes occasionally.) And I turned up dozens of errors. Looking closely at them, some of them I /knew/ I changed back in the early days of 2007, when we were editing the book. Something was horribly wrong. Looking more closely, these were present in the PDF as well. Walking back through the toolchain, I discovered them in the Scrivener file. When I reimported the original manuscript into Scrivener, I got the same results, plus a lot of "typos" I'd chased through the ebook version over the years. 


My first thought was "Oh crap. Is the file corrupted? Is the import process broken? Is this somehow in the original manuscript?" So I went back to the original manuscript, last edited when I cleaned it up prior to hand-making the first ebook version. Some time in '08, I think, and opened it up in Nisus Writer, just like the old days. When I searched on one of the errors, up it popped - in tracked changes. Every one of those glitches was a change Scott or I had made with Word tracked changes. Every stinking one. About 400 of them in all. Those changes were invisible on the body of the text in Nisus, and in Word too. Somehow, during the import to Scrivener, they were being re-exposed. The book was, essentially, being un-edited.

I sat down to file a bug report. On a whim, because I know that Scrivener leans heavily on OS X's RTF libraries, I tried importing the file into textedit, Apple's default text and RTF editor in OS X. Same result. Same stinking result.

The upshot? OS X's RTF libraries do not do anything sane or intelligent when presented with tracked changes. They concatenate the original and the changed text, and send it on up the pipeline. I do not now recall how I did the original port to Jutoh, but I very much suspect, given the number of people who've complained about the typos in the ebooks over the years, that it used the same RTF library somewhere along the line.

The solution? Fairly straightforward. Open the original RTF up in Word, make a copy, and tell word to Accept All Changes, and save it to an RTF. When I reimported that RTF, it was clean. Nisus Writer doesn't seem to have that capability (or I couldn't find it.) It was fairly well hidden in Word.

So, moving forward, I remade both the ebook versions and the LaTeX typeset version yesterday and today. It gave me an opportunity to clean up some LaTeX code and some of the sloppiness in the way I'd set it up in Jutoh. And I finally solved the mystery of why my later ebooks were such a mess. If you're reading this, and you have one of those messed up ebooks, email me and I'll hook you up with the new version. Meantime... watch this space. I hope to have the thing for sale fairly soon.

-JRS



Render unto Proprietary...

Render unto proprietary formats (Kindle) that which is proprietary (a novel) and with proprietary tools (Kindlegen.) Calibre, with their obsession with reverse-engineering the kindle formats, can't produce output that KDP will accept without mangling, but they continue to shriek that plugins to use kindlegen aren't needed. Pedantic behavior like that, I can live without. Just have to redo the book in Jutoh. What book, you ask? Well, a little bird tells me that Looking Glass may be back on the market in the foreseeable future.

Downloads Page is Back

As part of my update in support of Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings, I was quietly sunsetting the free downloads section of my site. Then I looked at the Google Analytics, and let's just say removing the second most popular page in the site seemed like a bad idea. So the Downloads page is back. :)

-JRS

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings On Sale Now

TLDR version: Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings double novel is available for purchase! More info on my website at http://www.jamesrstrickland.com!
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I'm pleased to announce that Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings (also known as Copperwood Double #1) is on sale now.

I've discussed Jeff Duntemann's Drumlin world before, but for those just tuning in, a quick recap.

Toward the middle of the 22nd century AD, the new Starship Origen departed Earth on her maiden voyage, bound for the colony on Numenor with a cargo of livestock, various frozen DNA samples of livestock, plants, and people, and a large number of scientists and university professors bound for SUNY Numenor. She never made it. Instead, when her Hilbert drive malfunctioned destructively, she emerged from her FTL jump all the way across the galaxy, in unexplored space, with no way of returning.

The castaways were fortunate enough to discover a planet strongly resembling Pleistocine Earth, and there they were forced to start a colony nobody had planned on, with only the tools and materials they'd brought with them. It wasn't easy. In the hard scrabble that ensued, a lot of the knowledge they'd brought with them was lost, and their civilization began to regress.

And there was something else. Scattered over the surface of the planet were tens of thousands of alien artifacts called thingmakers, each with a pair of pillars that make a drumlike sound when tapped, and a two and a half meter diameter bowl filled with silver dust. When 256 taps total are made, something will appear out of the dust in the bowl. Sometimes they're useful things, like axes and pilsner glasses and rulers. Often times they're unrecognizable metallic shapes.

Two and a half centuries later, the world those castaways named Valinor is slowly clawing its way back up the technological ladder. Steam locomotives have begun moving passengers and freight over iron rails, to and from the rural communities where the food is grown. The first hydrogen filled airships are being developed in secret. The uneasy truce between those who would re-develop human technology and those who would rely on drumlins has held. Humanity is prospering. An industrial revolution has begun.

As the title of the book suggests, there are two short novels printed in this book. The hardcopy is a double novel, like the old Ace Doubles of years gone by. Read one story, flip the book over, and read the other.

The first story is Drumlin Circus, by Jeff Duntemann. Drumlin Circus tells the story of Simon Kassel, a director of the Bitspace Institute, sent to suppress a drumlin used by the circus to train its animals. When his mission is wrecked by other Institute operatives who kidnap the animal trainer and her assistant, wounding Kassel in the process, Kassel joins the circus and becomes a very scary clown, bent on revenge against the Institute. He returns to Institute HQ to rescue Julia and Rosa only to discover that the function controller does a lot more than train animals. Played by an expert, human beings and even other drumlins will obey its tunes. And young Rosa is one very annoyed master.

The second story is On Gossamer Wings. I wrote it. Far out in the dusty farmlands of the Great Bowl, a strange, mute girl named Natalie Bishop discovered the rhythm for the Big Ball of Iron. This has not gone unnoticed by the Institute. Now, Institute director Hiram König has been sent to suppress it. What he finds is that in the meantime, Natalie has become a young woman, and the big ball of iron is only the beginning of what she's drumming up. Despite the fact that everyone considers her a mentally defective child who will never grow up, Natalie is determined to prove her worth, her intelligence, and her adulthood by drumming up the parts for a flying machine she's designed. It's up to König to spirit her and her unique gifts with the thingmakers out of the town of Joiners before the whole situation blows up and crushes her and her dreams of flying underfoot.

Drumlin Circus/On Gossamer Wings is for sale in ebook and dead-tree formats from Amazon and Barnes&Noble. We'll hopefully be making it available from more ebook sites and brick and mortar bookstores soon.

-JRS

Ebook Geekery

I happened to look over my April 5th posting on Ebook toolsets for mac, and on a lark, followed the links again. Turns out Kindlegen has been updated, and also, Amazon has released a kindle previewer for mac and PC.

Full info HERE.

I'm looking at Calibre's underlying command-line tools, and starting to think that it may be time to revisit how I generate the HTML for my ebooks. I do a lot of work cleaning up after the html generator I'm currently using. I need to poke at Calibre generally and see what parts of the front-end of ebook generation it can do for me without sacrificing the control I've come to want. I'm not investing any time in it right now, as I have no new content to put into ebook format(s), but there may come a time rather soon.

 

-JRS