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[Ben21897]

What is this?
This program is an exterior editing program for the books in Minecraft. It was made for signed books, but unsigned will work, too. It can also convert back and forth between the two versions, signed and unsigned. It also allows for more options while editing books. The two key options are title formatting and author changing. However, it also can edit many other aspects of the book item. Note, this is not a finished version, but it is stable enough for release and has all the key features. Only tweaks are likely to be implemented, but I'll add anything that the community suggests as long as it's a good idea. Also, please reload the book each time you save your Minecraft world, otherwise some item duplication may occur.

Note:
Here's a really good piece of software I found the other day by raeleus. It's called Multiplayer Book Paster and you can find it here. It basically allows you to paste entire books into Minecraft without having access to the server files. It makes Minecraft books much more user-friendly.

Download:
Revise v1.1.0
*Just click the "Skip" button in the top right for the download.
*This will be a .zip  with an auto-updating version(.jnlp) and a stand-alone(.jar)
*Open either by double clicking

Features:

• Edit signed and unsigned books
  
• Convert between the two
  
• Change and format the title
  
• Change the author
  
• Edit page contents
  
• Write more than 50 pages
  
• More than 256 characters per page
  
• More than 13 lines per page
  
• Easy, smart pasting
  
• Edit something previously typed without backspacing to it
  
• Export books to other worlds
  
• Save books as text files
  
• Share your books with the world
  
• Download the world's books
  
• Paste books straight to any server at all in the client

To Be Added:

• Page Re-Arrangement*
  
• Insert Page Button*
  
• Preview Pane rendered exactly like Minecraft*
  
• Custom Fonts
  
• Shortcuts for Formatting
  
• Formatting actually showing and not just §5 or whatever*
  
• Undo Button
  
• Different Fonts supported by Minecraft
  
• Spell Check
  
• Load books from chests, not just player inventories
  
• Remembering last folder saved to/loaded from*
  
• Support for é, è, à, ², ç, °, ù, £, ¤, µ
  
• Community Suggestions

*Scheduled for the next update

Known Bugs:

• Some books edited by this program stay in the inventory indefinitely, creating an infinite copy, but it seems very rare. I, myself, have not been able to recreate it.
  
• Some characters are not recognized, ex. é, è, à, ², ç, °, ù, £, ¤, µ

Videos:

Spoiler:

Make a video? Message me or comment and I'll put it here. Also, an updated video is on its way.

Pictures:

Spoiler:

Change-Log:

Spoiler:

v1.1.0 - 12/20/12
+Client-Side Pasting
+1.4.6 Support
*Better Page Measuring
*Improved Smart Paster
*More Button Animations

v1.0.5 - 8/14/12
+The MCLibrary
*Small improvements to the Smart Paster

v 1.0.4 - 8/3/12
+Stand-Alone version for problems on Windows
+Bug Report Link
*Saving, loading, and exporting of books into single-player worlds fixed

v 1.0.3 - 7/3/12
+Importing, exporting, saving, and loading of individual books

v 1.0.2 - 5/5/12
+Overwrite Notification
+Reminder to close Minecraft before editing
+Smart Paster
+Base code for importing and exporting single books
*Formatting occurs at cursor
*Changed formatting to appear more like it does ingame

v 1.0.1 - 5/3/12
*Fixed a bug with empty books being saved and then never editable

v 1.0.0 - 5/2/12
+First Release

Want the source code? Message me.

[rainfur245]

XD Just what I needed XD

[ALeone]

Awesome! This program is perfect, exactly what I was looking! I wanted to sign some books in an adventure map with one of the characters' names, and now I can. Thank you a ton! And this was blazing fast too... you are an amazingly quick modder/programmer.

I know this sounds silly and stupid, but could you put somewhere very obvious in the main post (maybe under Downloads?) how to actually run this program? I know this is stupid of me, but I spent about five minutes trying to install it as a mod because I'm not familiar with the .jnlp extension and I didn't read the entire "What is this?" section. Just saying "Double-click the downloaded file to run it" would probably save me and people of lower intelligence than me from looking more stupid than we are.

One feature I would love to see added to this at some point is the ability to export and import books from and into worlds. Say, exporting the book would save it to a file with a custom extension(?) somewhere on my hard drive, and importing would have me select a level.dat file and then a player inside of it, and would add the book to that player's inventory if there was room. Something like that. Or whatever's easier for you to implement, if this is possible at all. Thank you so much for the great work on this book editor!

[FireroseNekowolf]

It's a great start, but there are some issues that should be addressed. Now, perhaps it has to do with textures, I'm not sure. Maybe different book GUI's of different texture packs handle it different. So for the sake of this, this was done on what amounts to the default book GUI.

Firstly is that, while more characters and lines are good, there does need to be a limit. At current, the text goes well beyond the book's limit. In order to fix this, you have to go in-game, find the best line, and break it off from there. This makes it very tedious to copy anything larger than a few pages. Perhaps figuring out the limit of characters and lines (if believe 14 lines is the maximum before you really start overlapping with the turn page buttons), and then having a wrap over to the next page, that might be a great time-saver and convenience to implement.

A good tweak might be having formatting happen at the cursor, rather than at the end of the last written word.

Lastly, I don't know if this is a game bug or a bug caused by this program, but a book written by this program refuses to leave my inventory permanently. Every time I reload the world, it reappears in my hotbar, even when I place it into a chest or otherwise be rid of it, essentially creating an unlimited amount of copies.

[ALeone]

FireroseNekowolf, on 04 May 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

essentially creating an unlimited amount of copies.

Ooooo I may use this bug. Thanks.

[Ben21897]

Thanks so much for all the feedback!

ALeone, on 04 May 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

I know this sounds silly and stupid, but could you put somewhere very obvious in the main post (maybe under Downloads?) how to actually run this program?

I'll put something in right now.

ALeone, on 04 May 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

One feature I would love to see added to this at some point is the ability to export and import books from and into worlds.

Great idea, I'll work on that as soon as I address a couple of bugs mentioned by FireroseNekowolf. It shouldn't be too hard to implement, maybe an hour or two of coding.

FireroseNekowolf, on 04 May 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

Firstly is that, while more characters and lines are good, there does need to be a limit. At current, the text goes well beyond the book's limit.

Very good point. It is unlikely to be your texture pack, unless it has a custom font, so I will go ahead and put in some limits. Probably 14 lines as you suggested.

FireroseNekowolf, on 04 May 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

A good tweak might be having formatting happen at the cursor

Also a good idea, I didn't do that in the first release because I was trying to get it out quickly, but I'll change that very soon. In fact, I'll try to have the next release out by tomorrow night, Sunday at latest.

FireroseNekowolf, on 04 May 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

Lastly, I don't know if this is a game bug or a bug caused by this program, but a book written by this program refuses to leave my inventory permanently.

I was not aware of this bug, mostly because I tested in creative mode and never tried to take the books out of my hotbar. I'll do my best to fix this by next release. Thank you very much for bringing it to my attention.

Also, ALeone, I'll add in an option for copying books so that the bug fix doesn't hurt you.

[Ben21897]

FireroseNekowolf, on 04 May 2012 - 11:17 AM, said:

Lastly, I don't know if this is a game bug or a bug caused by this program, but a book written by this program refuses to leave my inventory permanently. Every time I reload the world, it reappears in my hotbar, even when I place it into a chest or otherwise be rid of it, essentially creating an unlimited amount of copies.

I'm having a little bit of trouble recreating this bug. First, is it in survival or creative? Second, do you still have the editor opened while loading your world? And third, are you reloading the book in the program after you move it out of your inventory? Because, the program loads and saves the complete inventory due to the fact that they are saved in the same file.

[FireroseNekowolf]

It was a Creative world. I did have the editor opened while I loaded the world - repeatedly. I was copy-pasting rather large amounts of text, so I was saving-reloading many times. Specifically, I would look at where to break the page, would edit it in Revise, then save & exit the world. While on the main screen, I would save the edits in Revise, and reload the world. Eventually, I finished the book, and put it in a chest to get it out of the way. When I reloaded the world again, there was a copy in my hotbar, and a copy in the chest. I should also note that the book went past the usual 50 page limit. I think it was like 53 or 54 pages total.

[Ben21897]

FireroseNekowolf, on 05 May 2012 - 01:28 AM, said:

Eventually, I finished the book, and put it in a chest to get it out of the way. When I reloaded the world again, there was a copy in my hotbar, and a copy in the chest.

Any chance I could get your level.dat? Maybe I could send you my email address? If not, I'll just keep fiddling with the saving, loading, and editing until I can recreate it.

[FireroseNekowolf]

Unfortunately, I had deleted it as it was only a test world. I'll see if I can recreate it myself as well.

Edit: While not the bug I speak of, I did come across a similar situation. If you have Revise open with an edited book, and you put that book away in-game, then save the edit in Revise, instead of simply editing the book, it spawns a whole new copy in hand.

[ALeone]

Yeah, there we go, I got my book to copy. I'm not sure how it should be fixed from a design standpoint, since I feel like you should really have Minecraft closed while you use Revise, but if you

• have a book in your inventory and have Minecraft open and
  
• you start Revise and load the book from your inventory
  
• then put the book in a chest
  
• then save and exit the world
  
• THEN "save" the book in Revise (from the menu)

You should have an extra book in your inventory when you open your world again. See if that replicates it.

[Ben21897]

ALeone, on 05 May 2012 - 02:59 PM, said:

You should have an extra book in your inventory when you open your world again. See if that replicates it.

Yep, that replicates it, but I'm not sure on how to get rid of that. I guess just reload the book after each minecraft-save. I'll put that somewhere in the main post.
Also, the reason for this is that Revise loads the entire inventory and saves the entire inventory, so you could theoretically copy any item, not just a book. I may try to check if Minecraft has run since Revise loaded a file so that maybe that way I can force a reload before saving, preventing item duplication. But, that then makes it so that any changes will be lost, unless I add in a lot more code, which I could. However, I think I'll just focus on the formatting, importing and exporting of books, and pasting text for now.

[ALeone]

Ben21897, on 05 May 2012 - 06:15 PM, said:

Yep, that replicates it, but I'm not sure on how to get rid of that.

It may not be very important for you to fix, but you could require or strongly encourage people to close Minecraft before they edit any books.

[Ben21897]

I'll add in some sort of notification when it opens saying to make sure Minecraft is closed and a notification if the file was edited in Minecraft while it was open in Revise asking to overwrite for now, but I'll try to find some better way of preventing it later. I want to finish the importing and exporting of books first.

[jack324]

i am having an issue with your .TXT smart paster.  it appears to be cutting off the text at the end of pages and on the next page the text continues but after three or four words past the point that was left off on the previous page. this only appears to be a problem in the editor itself, and does not carry over to the game itself. in the game the book is fully readable without error.

so its not a huge problem, but it can cause editing to become difficult after using your txt smart paster, since there will be text at the bottom of the page you cannot see and may miss.

[Ben21897]

jack324, on 30 May 2012 - 01:50 PM, said:

i am having an issue with your .TXT smart paster.  it appears to be cutting off the text at the end of pages and on the next page the text continues but after three or four words past the point that was left off on the previous page.

Thanks for the feed-back. I'll look into this right now, but any chance you could send me some screen-shots? I can probably figure it out without them, but they would help immensely.
[Edit] Never mind about the screen-shots. I'm fairly sure I know exactly how to fix it.

[Ben21897]

ALeone, on 04 May 2012 - 04:02 AM, said:

One feature I would love to see added to this at some point is the ability to export and import books from and into worlds. Say, exporting the book would save it to a file with a custom extension(?) somewhere on my hard drive, and importing would have me select a level.dat file and then a player inside of it, and would add the book to that player's inventory if there was room. Something like that. Or whatever's easier for you to implement, if this is possible at all.

Finally finished up the importing and exporting of books. They have the extension .mcbook. Thanks for the great idea! And, sorry for taking so long to implement it, I've just been caught up in other projects.

[Anistuffs]

Holy Craft! Thanks a TON for making this program mate. I can foresee a LOT of mapmakers using this in the future

I don't know if you have any features still to be added but do check out this thread: http://www.minecraft...tips-and-hacks/
it contains almost all the features the Minecraft book can offer

P.S. I think its a safe assumption that one would close Minecraft before using any sort of game-changing external tools like MCedit, NBTedit & the likes. If somebody doesn't do that, they're just ASKING for trouble :/

[Ben21897]

Anistuffs, on 09 July 2012 - 04:37 PM, said:

I don't know if you have any features still to be added but do check out this thread: http://www.minecraft...tips-and-hacks/
it contains almost all the features the Minecraft book can offer

Ya, that thread's awesome. That's where I started at and I'm still looking at it. It's great. I'm getting ready to work on the font feature mentioned in it, but thanks for reminding me!

[WolfieMario]

Ben21897, on 15 July 2012 - 09:01 PM, said:

Ya, that thread's awesome. That's where I started at and I'm still looking at it. It's great. I'm getting ready to work on the font feature mentioned in it, but thanks for reminding me!

I'm glad my thread helped you make all this

If I can suggest anything, it's to make the smart paster have dynamic limits (e.g. so the user can configure whether it behaves the default way, or only pastes as much text as a legit MC book can contain, or even, say, only has 5 lines of text per page). In addition, there should be an export feature, which exports text files from the book, and also allows the user to specify a 'page delimiter' (the default could be Microsoft Word's pagebreak, if that's just a normal Unicode character).

I actually wrote an AutoHotKey script that can paste a book into Minecraft, on the condition that the text you're pasting has "§p" anywhere you want a pagebreak. It's not a "smart" paste or anything; it can only paste pages which are short enough for Minecraft to naturally allow you to paste. But it's still very useful to me as I'm making a library in SMP and don't have admin rights on it. But anyways, since I plan to eventually release that AHK script, the features I suggested above may let people use both our works in conjunction for making books easily on servers

Also, how do you actually get the Smart Paster to paste? I open it up, and it already has stuff in there which I recently copied, but no GUI buttons or an indicator that anything's happening.