don- i see there's some heat in my spam-folder, but i have neither the time nor the desire to look at any of that... but again, i will need correct text if you want me to do the mcguffey. too much work to restore the diacritics. so if anyone has that correct text, don, do let me know. even with utf8 text, though, the .html that'd be created by epubmaker would still be a disaster, totally worthless. in the files section for the book at p.g., though, there's _gold_ (believe it or not) in the form of a word .doc file. the text lacks the page-breaks and line-breaks i require, and the diacritics are not there, but otherwise it is clean. so it is probably the most advanced place to start from... moreover, the .doc has a ton of nicely-clipped graphics, which would also provide a great head-start for people... i'm just sayin'... *** again, this is _not_ a good test-case. and it's probably more work than it's worth. plus did you notice how easily you could just point me to the scan-set on archive.org? for most people, who would want to read the book, or maybe just look at it, the scan-set is more than enough to meet their needs. this is what i was talking about a few days back, when i said that most people are very happy with a scan-set, with no need for clean digital text for the whole book, which is the only benefit that project gutenberg offers. (and, at least with this 7-bit text lacking the diacritics, p.g. can't even offer _that_ benefit, which is a bit sad.) if nobody uses the digital text, why bother cleaning it? *** considering all that, i'd think that it's probably best to just put this book aside. but if you still want to do it... -bowerbird