Task ③ ⇒ document markup

Transform a text file into a fully formatted, publication ready book

Task

document markup task logo

Find an e-book on the Project Gutenberg website that is interesting to you. Your task is to transform, through skilful formatting, a basic text version of the book into one created to be capable of being saved as a file capable of being read on an e-reader.

Retrieve the plain text version of the e-book from the Project Gutenberg site. Start with the main page and use the search tools on the site to find it. But how does one do this?

If you were to be interested in the book Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, you would navigate to its Gutenberg location and download the plain text version, in UTF-8 format, with no compression and a size of 212 KB, from the main site. Save the document on your client as a .txt file. Once you have the document on your client, open it in the program of your choice and save it in the program's file extension, so you can take advantage of some of the specific tools available in the program.

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Condition

Since the world is changing and e-books are becoming a reality, prepare this task for a client who wants a product ready for loading onto an e-book reader, perhaps something akin to a Kindle. That means the notional paper size to be used is six inches wide by nine inches tall. Of course, you will want to include some whitespace margins around the text. If you wish to format your book for your e-reader, you may make the notional paper size fit your particular version. Mine, for example, has a 3.5 by 6 inch screen space.

You will work individually on this task.

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Standard

You have a gradesheet to provide guidance. And you may wish to look at this presentation for a guide to how a document markup task might be done. The example here is not exactly the same as your task, but it is similar.

Save the finished product using the standard file name structure for this class.

An example might be

johnson.pat.20151007.task03.markup.docx

Send me the file name.

Everything on that gradesheet will be analogous to something we will have done in class.

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