There are two issues: when importing an epub file all lines are condensed into one giant paragraph, with no splitting and when converting the epub to a text file it does the opposite and inserts splits on almost every single line in the middle of sentences. This cause major issues when you try to highlight a phrase as anything interpreted as a new paragraph will not be included when trying to highlight the text. It is exceedingly time-consuming to go through every document and insert spaces/lines/paragraphs and you also have to keep referring back to the original to see where the lines are split. It’s completely non-intuitive. The same applies to having to remove the spacing from the lines it has decided to split - almost every single line. I have only tried to import a handful of lessons (up to 10 roughly) and every one of them has been a nightmare and I’ve ended up giving up and deleting most of them. It’s really a pain, and when you have precious little time it’s very frustrating. Is there a way around this? Is there a way to keep the text in correct format? It doesn’t need to include text formatting such as bold and italics. Thank you.
The best work around for this is to convert things into plain text and cut and paste it in the “Import Lesson” function. This method has been the most reliable for maintaining formatting. I import all my books this way.
Unfortunately, the Import Ebook function has been buggy from the beginning, I’m not sure why. LingQ sometimes works in mysterious ways.
Hi, I was wondering if you had any ideas about how to convert pdfs files of newspapers and magazines into plaintext format? I want to upload them to LingQ but I don’t know which software or apps could turn these pdfs into readable plain text.
I did mention that when I put them into plain text i.e. in a text file that I have to go through it and remove splits in lines. I still have to go through and edit to make sure that sentences aren’t split into a paragraph because I cannot highlight phrases that are split across lines. It’s not really a good workaround. I still also have to go into the text file and find the relevant chapter and highlight from there to the end of the chapter, wherever that may be (not all chapters have names to make it easy to find them). If it’s a book that can be difficult to find. Do you not find the same issues when importing books? I tried with a couple of books and deleted them because they were a mess.
Calibre does it. It’s free software. It’s very simple to covert. You locate the pdf file on your hard drive and select it and then from a dropdown menu you choose which format you’d like to save in and it converts it.
I just copy and paste the entire book from plain text into a lesson and let LingQ split them into lessons of 2200 words. This tends to hold onto the paragraph formatting pretty well overall.
Personally, I don’t care about chapters, I just care about amount of words read per day, so I don’t care where the chapters get split, or marked, etc. And I only use LingQ for books, not so much for articles.
But again, the LingQ formatting is not perfect in either scenario. Most of time I will have the audiobook playing along when I’m reading, so that allows for “getting” the formatting context and chapter breaks etc. And when I don’t have the audio, I usually actually will read on my Kindle and then stop at every 100 Kindle locations and swipe through the same text on LingQ just to mark words as needed. (@100 locations is usually about 2200 words, or one lesson’s worth of text here)
Not sure if those help, but those are my methods of staying with a reasonably good reading experience while getting the most out of this site despite its imperfections.
That might work, but just now I’m trying to import a book that has chapter summaries and then quizzes. It also has a vocabulary with English translations at the end of each chapter. I tried importing it from a text file but it was just a mess so I had to delete it. Personally, it’s just too much work. I have spent hours tonight trying to get this book imported. I think I’ll have to look for other options than Lingq. Not really sure what there is though.
On another topic, which has nothing to do with Lingq - I only just discovered tonight that I can’t download the Audible files I paid for and so I can’t import them into Lingq, so it looks like I’ll just be reading and listening to what’s already on here.
For what it’s worth, I think it’s pointless to try to upload Audible files to LingQ. Just listen along to them on a separate device and update your listening stats manually if needed.
There’s an online tool you can use: “Add Line Breaks Online”: Add Line Breaks
And if you need to remove line breaks: Remove Line Breaks Online Tool
I tried to listen on the same machine with Audible running and reading Lingq but it kept stopping the audio, so I might have to try with a separate device as you suggest.
That’s a great help, thank you!
Pretty much everything else in this thread but I also use NotePad++ to join text files first into one long “line” then split it back out on 60 characters or so.
After that, put in a couple of newlines after every few sentences (periods etc.) or so.
Then if LinqQ still won’t take it I drop it into a Word doc and print it as a PDF which typically imports much more reliably.
My largest problem at this point if the dearth of lesson/file management tools. It is extremely tedious as best to remove dozens of broken lesson that didn’t “import” but did however create a “file” (which can’t be opened or read.)