I’ve been extremely frustrated with my experience reading ebooks on LingQ to date, and among the most frustrating inconveniences is the formatting getting completely butchered.
I’ve been reading the French book Tous les hommes n’habitent pas le monde de la même façon, which I uploaded myself to LingQ. When I go to the edit course page and view the individual lessons in the editor, everything seems good. But when I’m actually reading the book in LingQ, two deeply annoying things happen.
First, paragraph breaks appear in essentially random places, with little correspondence to the paragraphs in the actual text. To give some examples, on the off chance someone at LingQ wants to look into this, if we go to the very first page of the book, there’s a paragraph break that gets inserted when I study the lesson after the third sentence (“Ici il fait du bruit.”). Why? There’s no paragraph break in the original text and it doesn’t show up in the lesson editor. Sometimes it goes the other way around, too, with paragraph breaks disappearing. Looking at lesson (4), the fourth paragraph should end with “…une délicate et protectrice ombrelle.” But in the lesson view, the paragraph doesn’t end here; the next sentence (“Mes grands-parents…”) continues right after it.
Second, and somehow even more troubling, closing quotes (») get stripped! Returning to lesson (4), there should be a » at the end of the first paragraph, after “…des conneries pareilles ?” But when I’m viewing the lesson, it’s not there. Indeed most closing quote marks are totally absent.
Between the two of them it’s way harder to read this book than it should be, when I can’t tell where one paragraph begins or ends and can’t tell when someone has finished speaking or not!
What gives?