Working with literature books in OneNote

One way I use OneNote with my tablet is to make comments on text. I generally have a column of text along the left side of the page and use my pen to write comments to the right side.

Yes, I have lousy handwriting. Anyway, a tremendous repository of classic books is at www.gutenberg.org. One of my first "tests" to learn OneNote was taking the text of a book from the Gutenberg site and pasting it into ON to make comments. The text I chose was Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice based on the recommendation of a friend. You can get the .TXT or .ZIP file at https://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1342.

I simply copied the entire text of the book into a single OneNote page with the idea that I would write my comments off to the side. It did not work well.

The Gutenberg text file is formatted for 80 column screens. Word wrap did not work correctly when resizing the OneNote text area horizontally. Ugh. Also, scrolling up and down was tedious, confusing and time consuming.

So I decided to write a tool to get rid of the line breaks inserted into the text. Specifically, I wanted line breaks only at the end of a paragraph, and not mid sentence. I also wanted the blank lines between paragraphs removed.

To help with the navigation, instead of wanting the entire book pasted onto one page, I wanted each chapter to get it's own page, with the entire book contained in one section.

Already there is a problem with these goals. Next, I will share the power toy and point out the (big) problem which becomes rapidly apparent when using it, and point out when not to use it.