Importing Theatre texts / Formatting Line Breaks

Hello,

I read a lot of theatre scripts and would love to be able to use LingQ to import and read some scripts in Spanish. However everytime I import as an ebook, the formatting messes up completely. It doesn’t recognise the new line breaks (which are a lot more frequent than in a prose text) and so formats chunks of lines as paragraphs. I was wondering if anybody knows why this is, or has any hints/get arounds? At the moment, it is making script reading on LingQ pretty impossible.

Normal formatting:

CHARACTER A: blah blah blah
CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah
CHARACTER A: blah blah blah
CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah
CHARACTER A: blah blah blah
CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah

But LingQ is displaying like this:

CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CHARACTER B: blah blah blah blah blah

Any help would be much appreciated,

Joe

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This is easy with Notepad++ as I’ve done the same with plays.

Load the file in Notepad++ and press “Alt-Shift +C” or View->Show Symbols->Show all characters

That will show you line breaks. They’ll look something like this.

CHARACTER A: blah blah blah CRLF

This may vary depending on your system. I believe Windows uses CRLF as a line break.

A simple fix would be to replace all CRLF with two CRLF. This is done in Search-Replace.
NB: Make sure Search Mode is in “Extended” mode first!!

CR(Carriage Return) is represented with a \r
LF(Line Feed) is represented with a \n

Then search for “\r\n” and replace with “\r\n\r\n”. This works well enough for me. You will need to experiment here depending on how your document was formatted.

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Thank you so much for this! It’s worked. I’ve been converting pdf to txt via word and then using Notepad++ , so thank you!

1 Like