What's the Best way to import into a user tool?

[Brent Lawrence]

The User Tool capability of Accordance is great, but I find that I'm increasingly frustrated by the results when importing into a User Tool.

 

I appreciate the automatic scripture linking of the .html format being imported, but I have noticed lately that I get some really unwanted results. For example: my sermons are kept on my computer as Word docs. I then save them as an .html file and start the import process. However, when Accordance is done I sometimes am left with wording in the text being grouped together likethis. Then, I will have some kind of a strange font with some sort of shadow effect as if I'd used a strange type of font, though I pretty much use the same font all the time.

 

The font shadowing is not so much of an issue since I can change the format of the font in the edit window, but it's when the words get bunched together as if somehow I had forgotten to hit the spacebar. The fix is time consuming and frankly not worth the effort.

 

My main question is, what is the best format to use to prepare a document to be imported into Accordance so you get proper spacing of words, font consistency and yet the benefit of the automatic scripture linking? Is it just better to use the .txt format for importing?

 

Is the problem above related more to something strange with how Word saves files into the .html format and then how Accordance handles the import? I'm at a loss.

 

The main goal of bringing my sermons into Accordance is essentially to have them be searchable along with other Accordance modules. This is one of the main features that sold me on Accordance a few years ago and yet the one that gives me trouble.

 

Any suggestions as to how to nail this down would be a great.

 

@blawrence2

[Steve King]

Hi Brent,

 

I just got back from a few days away so have not been on the Accordance forums since you posted this. I assume you are using the Mac version of Word. If you are then when you save as html it has carriage control characters embedded in it which causes the 'missing space' problem. I use TextWrangler which is a free application to solve the problem.

 

Once you have saved the html file in Word then open with TextWrangler and using the 'Text' menu select 'Remove Line Breaks'. Save the file. When you import into Accordance now it will have all the correct spacing.

 

If you have the Windows version of Word then when you save it as html it will not have the 'missing space' problem anyway so you will not have to use TextWrangler.

 

Hope that solves your problem. It is certainly better than trying to add all the spaces back in manually!!

 

Regards

 

Steve

[Anon]

As Steve mentioned above, the CR/LF needs to be removed systematically from a file. While Text Wrangler is more than efficient to do the job, Tex-Edit Plus is another shareware Tex Editor, which is based on the WASTE text engine. It supports Grep searches, and it's a highly scriptable Application, with full RTF support.