Are there any MS word formatting options to automatically format an ebook downloaded as text from Gutenberg?
Some of the books have html versions, and if you copy and paste the html text from a web browser into Word it will usually preserve the formatting. For the pure ascii texts, though, I think you’re stuck doing most of work manually.
I think edonnelly’s post is probably the only way you can do this. You can import an ascii text into Word, but the whole point of ascii is that there really isn’t really much formatting.
If you download the html version into Word and the html formatting isn’t to your liking, don’t forget you can change styles in Word (ie if the typeface is too big) then change the font size of that style (it will probably be called something like “normal - web”).
If the HTML file looks OK you can probably just add page breaks and adjust the margins to suit your binder - I presume printing out is what you are trying to do.
If there is only an ascii file available, I would suggest you get the program Notetab from www.notetab.com. This has a various options for manipulating text, converting to HTML,etc. (And there is a free version).
There’s no easy way to do this that I’m aware of. Some work is required in order to come up with a pleasing format.
However, you would be surprised what you can get done in MS Word using the find/replace features.
In Word, if you view the document to show formatting so that you see line breaks and paragraph returns you can use those characters to swap in and out additional formatting.
jeff