A Few Words on Plain Text Files

I provide the plain text versions of the books for three reasons:

– if PDF is not a good or valid choice for the reading device that you use (including, for instance, speech output);

– if you want to perform complex search operations, using regular expressions, that are not supported by your PDF reader;

– if you want to save the money for the Library Card.

In the first two cases, you may want to consider the plain text files not as an alternative, but as a supplement to the formatted e-books.

Plain text format details

The plain text files are not word-wrapped for line length limitation, and thus are not disrupted by arbitrary line breaks – one line of the text file is one paragraph in the book (or one line of verse).

The character set is Windows 1252, but only four characters are used that are not also part of the standard ISO-8859-1 character set: typographic quotation marks and apostrophes. If your system does not display these characters correctly, you can easily replace them using any text editor.

Dashes are represented as double hyphens, and ellipses as three dots. If your system does support Windows 1252, you can easily restore the typographically correct symbols.

Symbols outside the scope of ISO-8859-1 are replaced by standard Latin characters. Text in non-Latin alphabets (e.g. Greek) is lost, as are illustrations, and some typographical or layout details.

Italic text is enclosed in _underline_ characters.

Header lines have the prefix » (level 1) or »» (level 2), they are preceded by blank lines.

Quotes, lyrics etc. are separated from the rest of the text by blank lines.

Footnote references are enclosed in curly brackets. Footnotes directly follow the paragraphs in which they are referenced, and are enclosed in curly brackets. Footnotes may have one or more paragraphs (lines), they always end at the closing curly brackets.

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