GutClean is a Windows utility that allows you to format e-texts directly for display in an electronic reader. You can download the utility here but please first read the page about viruses and malware since you will have to trust me on the content and it's important you understand the implication of that.
In the old days when we used a typewriter we manually moved the carriage back at the end of each line while at the same time moving it forward to the next line. We can call this a 'hard return'. When you press the 'Enter' key in your editor or wordprocessor you are essentially adding a hard return to your file.
In most editors and wordprocessors it's not necessary that the file you're looking at has hard returns built into it at the end of each line because the software knows when to make it appear that a new line has started. This is called 'wordwrap'. Hard returns are only necessary at the end of paragraphs.
One advantage of wordwrap is that you can then very easily resize your document without worrying that the lines will come out all wrong.
However very many e-texts are the result of scanning books. The scanning software marks the end of each line with a hard return. So long as you're looking at an e-text in a sufficiently large display (or use a sufficiently small font) that introduces no real problems though the result is still not usually as nice as with wordwrap alone.
However if you try to resize an e-text with these hard returns to the smaller sizes generally used by electronic readers then you do have a significant problem. The hard returns mean that new lines are started when they're not needed and you only have to load one such e-text into GutClean, roughly the size of a typical electronic reader, to realise that the resulting text is pretty well unreadable.
The cure for this is not easy without a program such as GutClean. You can remove the hard returns with a word processor but you have to know what you're doing and it is tedious.
GutClean does it all automatically in a few seconds with a couple of reservations:
1. It can't at the moment cope with poetry and there will probably always be passages, like my address in'Welcome.txt', which will need re-editing.
2. If an e-text doesn't space the paragraphs themselves (zero paragraph spacing) then GutClean can't cope because it will have no way of distinguishing between ends of lines and ends of paragraphs. The 'Far from the Madding Crowd' extract in the Samples folder is an example of such a file. Happily most Gutenberg texts do not use zero paragraph spacing and GutClean can deal with them.
GutClean will, however, allow you to format and save an e-text with zero paragraph spacing (what is after all generally used in books) but bear in mind that if you then re-enter Edit mode you won't be able to Clean your e-text again without ruining everything (the book will become one enormous long paragraph).
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