Help Formatting Project Gutenberg Books
I've recently learned the little hack that is downloading Public Domain books from Project Gutenberg and then formatting and printing them for binding. This is very exciting for me.
However, I'm running into a little snag: most people just convert the e-book into a PDF and call it a day. But I'm trying to be a little extra and to do my own formatting in inDesign to better have control over how my book will look. Besides, the PDF conversion sometimes makes some weird formatting errors appear.
The main issue I'm having is that there's no clean way to copy and paste a books text into inDesign or any software. Copying from either the PDF, Plain Text, or the ebook introduces superfluous formatting suck as paragraph breaks or strange characters.
The system I'm using right now is to pull the text from the Plain Text file, manually remove the periodical line breaks, and then go back and add special formatting like italics (in this case demarcated with underscores).
Does anyone know a good way to just get raw text of these old books with only the essential formatting? (ie appropriate paragraph breaks, italics, margins when necessary)What is all y'all's workflow for those of you printing books for binding?