jana said:

Now, I get stuff like this:

oops. ok, i'll fix that. good eye.

Oh ick, are you serious about that background image?...

well, i like it. plus it's funny when people squirm. but i will change it for you... :+)

What are those @@@ lines? Whatever they might be, they don't belong into the output, so get rid of them.

well, they are scene-breaks, so yes, they _do_ belong in the output. but you don't like "@@@"? ok, i'll change it to the standard "***" for you...

Or, how about letting the user choose background and foreground colours?

i'm all in favor of user-choice. and isn't it very interesting, folks, that once you start _asking_ people what they actually prefer, you learn that they have all kinds of preferences lurking there. once you give them control, they want to control the style of the quotes, and the style of dashes, and the background and foreground colors, and even the way that they choose to _spell_ "colours", all kinds of things. and yes, of course, if you just feed 'em something -- heck, just about anything -- they will eat it, and not complain much, and maybe you _think_ you are "making them happy" with that, but it's only because you offered them zero choice... if they are allowed to seize the power to control the display to their own preferences, they _will_ do so... there is an important lesson to be learned here... ***

weren't you going to allow us to load in our own text to the app?

yes, and a limited version of that is now there. in the search-field, type "doload140" -- one word, no spaces, no quotes -- and then press [enter]... give it a minute, because it's loading in a copy of "the jungle" directly from project gutenberg, pg#140. then type "dosplit" in the search-field, and press [enter] to have the file split up into its sections... again, give it couple minutes, because it has to upload the file from you, and then split it, and this is a rather big book (800k), so it takes time. when it has finished, it will display the first section. if you examine the pop-up menu, you will discover something strange. it skips from chapter 21 to chapter 24. also, it ends at chapter 26, which might not seem strange unless you know that this book actually contains _31_ chapters. the problem here is that pg#140 wasn't consistent in following the rule that chapter-headers are preceded by 4 blank lines. you can verify this by looking at pg#140 yourself:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/140/140.txt

indeed, what you will find is that only chapter 1 and chapter 21 have 4 blank lines preceding them. (and chapter 1 is inconsistent too, because it has 5.) my routine was still able to find most of the chapters in spite of this because it required only 3 blank lines. nonetheless, it still missed several chapters. so let's do this. reload the text from project gutenberg: type "doload140" in the search-field and press [enter]. now, instead of typing "dosplit", type "docorrection" in the search-field and press [enter]. this routine will use a different rule for splitting the file into sections. it will look for the word "chapter" at the start of a line. because of these inconsistencies in the p.g. library, it's hard to make rules to handle all the edge cases. it's better to find the inconsistencies and correct them, so the rules we compose can be as simple as possible. especially for fundamental necessities, like finding the sections of the book, we want the rules to be simple... it was because project gutenberg absolutely refused to ensure consistency in its files that i gave up on it. -bowerbird