[Hidden-tech] Twitter-software question

[R. David Murray]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:06:12 -0500, Jeff Rutherford <jeff at jeffrutherford.com> wrote:
> I work with a book publisher on certain book marketing/PR projects.
> We're considering taking a chapter of a new book and chopping it up
> and tweeting the entire chapter - piece by piece.
> 
> However, I don't really want to manually have to go through a 8-10
> page document and cut it up 140 characters at a time.
> 
> Do you know of any software that I could cut and paste the text and
> have it automatically divide it up into 140 character chunks? Is there
> some hidden feature within Microsoft Word that would do something like
> that?

I would handle this by running catdoc or antiword on it to extract the
text, then write a short python program to break it up as required.
Splitting it into literally 140 character chunks would be easy,
splitting it so while avoiding splitting on word boundaries would be only
fractionally more complicated.  Paying attention to sentence boundaries
might get a bit tricky, but could be done as well, perhaps with a
bit of manual fixup afterward.

There's also a Python twitter library that could be used to do the
actual tweeting of the text, if you wanted to automate that part
as well.

Give me a call (phone number on web site) or drop and email if you'd
like to talk about having me do this for you.

--David                         www.bitdance.com