Word Cleaner 7.x is the best desktop option for sending an old book from a Word file to genuinely clean Amazon ebook-ready HTML, via its standard template “Convert to HTML and remove formatting”. It retains linked and anchored footnotes, bold, italics etc. Two simple tweaks on this cleaning template can also convert all accents and symbols like © to HTML code entities, and also do the same for the quote marks, —’s and apostrophes. For a minute of work, you’re 90% of the way to an ebook that will validate when uploaded to the Amazon ebook system.

But there’s a big drawback. It can’t retain the indented paragraphs, of the type you used to add your scholarly quotes in Microsoft Word. What you want, then, before you export is to add some nice HTML blockquote tags on your quotes…

These tags will survive passing through the Word Cleaner template, and will display the text as an indented quote in your cleanly-coded HTML ebook.

Are you going to go through and add those tags to 300+ quotes, by hand? No, you’re going to have Word to do it for you. Without fiddling around with macros.

WORKFLOW:

Scenario: you used the Indent paragraph button to add the quotes in your scholarly book, and thus have all quotes indented by 0.5.

1. Alt + H to open the Search/Replace box. Click on “More” button in bottom-left of the box.

2. Place cursor into “Find what” box. Click “More” to open up the lower half of this box. Then click the “Format” button in the bottom-left.

3. Dial the Indentation up to 0.5 (or whatever you have it set to)…

4. Exit the Format | Find Paragraph panels and then place your mouse cursor into the “Replace With” box. Type in your blockquote tag. Run the search and replace.

5. Return both Search/Replace boxes to their default, by clicking “No formatting” on each.

6. Now you do this wildcard search-and-append, adding the required ending tag to any paragraphs that contain the word “blockquote”.

To work, this needs you to have ticked “Use wildcards”…

Once there’s a recurring unique word in the quote paragraphs, then Word can hook onto that to add the closing tag to the end of each such paragraph. The tag is added after any footnote-number at the end of the quote, if there is one.

Completing this process will have also tagged… i) indented paragraphs quotes that do not begin with ” and… ii) multiple-paragraph indented quotations and most indented lists, poetry etc. That would not have been the case had we just tagged all paragraphs starting with a “.

You should end up with this…

Note that if you have such indents in the footnotes as well, then you’ll also need to run these two there as well. You may still have some numbered lists or poems that will require search for a ^t tab or a different indentation of other than 0.5.

Finally, remove your drop caps at the start of each chapter, and then save the Word .doc, and load it to Word Cleaner 7.x. This really is the best and easiest desktop option, based on my day of intensive searching and testing in 2019. But if you really need desktop freeware then HTML Cleaner 1.02 is a Windows GUI freeware that is genuinely free, and though difficult to use is quite powerful and has a Help file. You may also want to test a half-dozen free online services, though you may find they choke on a huge 400-page book with indented quotes and footnotes, and that they may be aimed at accurate replication-in-HTML rather than tag stripping and cleaning for Kindle ebooks.

Curators and archivists may sometimes come across the once-popular Quicktime format known as QTVR. Possibly as abandonware, or under a permissive licence, or freely released by the maker. The format offered a 360-degree picture in an immersive viewer and Web plugin. The equivalent experience today is ‘Google StreetView’ or ‘Facebook 360 pictures’, but with a genuine 360-degree view, able to look right up into the sky and right down at the ground under your virtual feet.

The defunct QuickTime is no longer a viable install due to major security risks. Yet it was once widely used. Not only for point-and-click CD-ROM games (Myst etc) and as output from 3D landscape software such as MojoWorld, but also for virtual tours of heritage sites. Some historians of the digital may thus have archives of this type of image that they now wish to convert to display as a 360 VR ‘bubble picture’ on Facebook / WordPress, or in HTML5. Videogame environments can also be captured and ported this way, enabling a better understand of an old videogame environment than is possible by simple screenshots. In the image(s) above you see a Half-life 2 videogame level.

I’m always keen to find ways to keep old media alive, especially if it has a permissive licence such as Creative Commons, and so this post is a quickstart on the practicalities of conversion.

QTVR is likely to be encountered in one of two formats. The six 90° × 90° still source images that form the sides of the viewing cube, or these same images compiled into a single .MOV Quicktime movie for display in the Quicktime Player.

.MOV format:

The $32 conversion utility Bixorama can import and convert the .MOV file, and output to a universal HTML5 viewer or other panorama formats.

6 x cube images:

My first thought was simple freeware utilities, but there don’t seem to be any that have a Windows GUI.

Next I thought to use my install of the panorama-assembler PTGui ($115). But I found my trusty and venerable old version of PTGui was a little too venerable, and thus could not handle a set of QTVR tiles. I then learned that PTGui only added support for QTVR tile import from version 8.2. But it was not until the recent 11.0 version that this workflow became easy and streamlined, and only in 11.2 (June 2018) that a major bug with this same workflow was fixed. Thus, if you don’t need the nice authoring tools of Pano2VR (see below), then using the latest PTGui 11.2 might save you $50.

However, today the easiest and slickest tool I found that could easily stitch the six cube images was the $170 Pano2VR 6.0. This is a full-fledged ‘virtual tour maker’ aimed at institutions, tourism businesses and real-estate, and as such it’s quite friendly and easy-to-use despite its obvious power. It can add clickable hot-spots and basically seems to be able to do what the old QuickTime Pro authoring tool could do.

Load the six image tiles via Pano2VR’s ‘Input’ button | ‘Cube Faces’ panel. You just link up each of the six cube tiles until a seamless 360 VR bubble panorama is created over in Pano2VR’s real-time previewer.

Then you export to either: i) the Pano2VR HTML5 viewer (requires a secure server to host); or ii) use the ‘QuickShare’ button (top right of the user interface) to get a Facebook 360-friendly image for upload. That remaps the assembled cube to a standard panorama projection and pops out a single .JPG image.

To Facebook 360: You then simply upload this .JPG to Facebook like any other picture. Facebook will recognise that the image is a panorama and needs to be shown inside a 360 VR bubble, without any need for special metadata. Note that Facebook tends to desaturate colour in pictures by about 10%, so you may want to boost the saturation before you upload.

To WordPress.com: WordPress.com free blogs now support embedding 360° VR pictures via a simple shortcode and a rather clunky viewer. But note you must host the image externally, and it can’t be called from the Media Library of the blog. WordPress.com’s Media Library often has difficulties with huge image uploads, and so presumably WordPress prefers not to encourage people to wrestle with uploading huge 30Mb panoramas. I’m uncertain if moving from free to paid would unlock this shortcode to support images in your Media Library.

To a WordPress based self-hosted blog, on your own webspace: Such blogs seem to have the above-mentioned shortcode functionality disabled. Apparently a security fix for WordPress knocked out a lot of shortcodes, a while back. Instead I chose to install the free plugin DImage 360. This is not over-complicated, yet does have the very nice feature of allowing visitors to ‘zoom-in’ as well as ‘pan around’ your panorama. Its embed code is as a simple as the official WordPress shortcode, and the source image can be hosted in your blog’s Media Library.

Ok, I hope that’s helpful, in terms of saving time for those tasked with converting old QTVR to a format we can view today.