When uploading texts from YouTube, pdfs and epub books, there are often annoying line breaks. These happen when a sentence is broken in the middle, to fit on the page, or to fit to speech on YouTube, for instance:
“The man told me I had
to look elsewhere.”
These are particularly frustrating when using the Read Aloud feature, as the voice pauses at the line break, as though it was at the end of a sentence.
For months I’ve been getting over this by using the online Textfixer Remove Line Breaks tool. This is very quick (I assume it’s all done by Javascript, no AI involved), but I had always thought it would be nice if it could somehow be built into Readlang.
And then, just the other day, I discovered that it in fact is, in a feature I had overlooked, partly I think because I didn’t understand its function.
Probably many of you know this already, but for anyone who like me missed it, on the Edit page in the sidebar below the main text editing box there’s a tick box (BrE) / check box (AmE) - “Ignore single new lines”. When ticked/checked this removes all those pesky line breaks, making the Read Aloud feature much more agreeable.
Here’s an epub version of Les Trois Mousquetaires from Project Gutenberg. When I first uploaded it to Readlang it was full of annoying line breaks, but when I ticked the magic box, they all disappeared. So now it’ll make a nice audio book (on Edge) ( Readlang )
I notice that there are other uploads of the same book, full of line breaks. So I’d suggest that anyone who uploads texts for public use, for example books from Project Gutenberg, articles from Wikipedia, etc, tick/check this box, as only the uploader has access to this page - it will make reading (and especially listening) much more of a pleasure for the rest of us.
As an aside, for those of you who haven’t noticed, YouTube automated transcriptions have got much better lately, often with full capitalisation and punctuation, making them excellent for Readlang use (I sometimes just upload the text, without the video link, and use Read Aloud instead). But they still have these line breaks, which one simple tick gets rid of.