Great! I've been looking for something like this for a while. Is there any way to bundle this in an Automator droplet so you could just drag and drop your text file? I'm not quite sure how to tell Automator how to apply the script to the text file.

Thanks!

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windrag | 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo | 160GB HD | 2GB RAM | OS X 10.5.4

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Actually, I just tried to run this script with the instructions given and I get the following error:

<code>-bash: ./makenotes.pl: /usr/bin/perl^M: bad interpreter: No such file or directory</code>

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windrag | 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo | 160GB HD | 2GB RAM | OS X 10.5.4

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OK, so I figured out the problem (the command perl is what runs the script, like this:

perl ./makenotes.pl colourofmagic.txt

Probably obvious to most, but I'm not a regular perl user. So, I got it to work, but I'm used to using UTF-8 text files, and this script returns a bunch of improperly translated characters. I changed my text file encoding to Western (Mac OS Roman) and the output looks great, except that the first page is just one character. Anyway, thanks again!

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windrag | 2.4GHz MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo | 160GB HD | 2GB RAM | OS X 10.5.4

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Based on that error message, it looks like maybe you might have transferred that file between Windows and Unix/Linux in ASCII mode and introduced a CRLF problem. I'm making that guess based on the "^M" included in the error message. On Unix, we typically remove that with a sed command: 's/^V^M//g' (where ^V^M are done simultaneously and so only appears as ^M). You could also try transferring again in BINARY mode.

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I see you like Terry Pratchett. Can I pass off your script as my own?

Surely the solution to reading long text files is Safari? I don't have an Iphone, but it's the same browser, right?

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I'm new to perl, but I used your script as the basis for my own, which looks for a line break and then a word break to optimize space without cutting out mid-word. Limitations: The title has a max length of 15 chars (107 bytes for markup + 3954 for text = 4051 bytes; title is repeated in 3 markups).

unless (@ARGV) {
print "Usage: $0 <filename(s)>\n";
exit(1);
}

foreach my $file (@ARGV) {
if (-f $file) {
print "$file exists.\n";
&chopfile($file);
} else {
print "$file not found.\n";
}
}

sub chopfile {
my $filename = shift;
open(my $longfile, "<", $filename) || die ("can't open $filename");
my @arr = ();
my $len = 0;
my $i = 0;
print "Title:> \n";
my $title = <STDIN>;
chomp($title);
mkdir($title);
chdir($title);
while (<$longfile>) {
my $trylen = length($_);
if (($len + $trylen) <= 3954) {
push(@arr, $_);
$len += $trylen;
} else {
my $diff = 3954 - $len;
my $addme = substr($_, 0, rindex($_, " ", $diff));
my $addmelater = substr($_, (rindex($_, " ", $diff) + 1));
push(@arr, $addme);
open(my $output, ">", $title.$i.".txt");
print $output "<?xml encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\n";
print $output "<TITLE>".$i." ".$title."</TITLE>\n";
print $output "<A HREF=\"".$title.($i-1).".txt\" NOPUSH><</A>\n" unless ($i == 0);
print $output @arr;
print $output "\n<A HREF=\"".$title.($i+1).".txt\" NOPUSH>></A>";
close $output;
@arr = $addmelater;
$len = length($addmelater);
print $title.$i." created.\n" if (($i % 10) == 1);
$i++;
}
open(my $output, ">", $title.$i.".txt");
print $output "<?xml encoding=\"utf-8\"?>\n";
print $output "<TITLE>".$i." ".$title."</TITLE>\n";
print $output "<A HREF=\"".$title.($i-1).".txt\" NOPUSH><</A>\n" unless ($i == 0);
print $output @arr;
close $output;
}
}

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