Formatting Electronic Texts for the CCEL

1. Format with paragraph styles in Microsoft Word

If you apply certain paragraph styles in Microsoft Word in a consistent manner, it will make the job of conversion to other formats and adding a book to the CCEL much easier.

You can get the styles in the RTF document Styles.RTF. Use the styles as follows:

Body -- for most normal text

Heading 1, Heading 2, ... --> these levels of headings will appear in the table of contents, and documents will normally be split into pieces at any Heading 1 or Heading 2 paragraph. Typically, the main section titles will be Heading 2 (preface, book or chapter titles, etc.)

h1, h2, h3 --> these look like Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc., but they don't appear in the table of contents and the document is not split. They are used in places like the title page, where large fonts are desirable but the text should not appear in the table of contents. verse1, verse2, verse3 -- for poetry, hymns, etc.

Centered -- for paragraphs that should be centered hr -- a paragraph of the hr style will cause a horizontal rule in the html document

BlockQuote -- for block quotes.

See the example in the Styles.RTF document for some additional subtleties.

2. Entering Greek and Hebrew

If the book you are working on contains Greek or Hebrew text, please download and install the public domain font Iconic or Tiberian from this site. You will probably want to print out the document showing the key sequence for each character, to use as a quick reference while you are typing Greek or Hebrew text. Currently SPIonic.RTF (for Greek text) is available.

Hebrew text goes from right to left, but most word processors don't support that and the text will have to be entered from left to right. Thus, those of you who are familiar with Hebrew will realize that you are typing it backwards.

This document (last modified October 21, 1997) from the Christian Classics Electronic Library server, at @Wheaton College