Nursing student here!
So we get a shit load of reading assignments, and since everything’s digital nowadays, I’ve been leaning a lot on text-to-speech software that effectively converts reading assignments to listening assignments.
The problem is textbooks have a LOT of just… noise. Every image has something like “FIGURE 13.5 SURGICAL DISASTERS!” “FIGURE 13.6 YOU GOT SUMMONED TO COURT!” etc. In-text citations are EVERYWHERE, copyright info is EVERYWHERE… reading the content, you just skip over all that crap, but pasting it into a TTS service, all that trash gets spoken aloud and adds up to a huge time sink every chapter, and distracts from the actual lesson.
Googling it, the best I’ve been able to come up with is doing a find and replace in MS word for things like FIGURE **.*^13 with wildcards on and the replace field blank… but it’s not very consistent - sometimes it works, sometimes not. Same with nuking parenthesis and the text within with \(*\)
All that said, I’m wondering if I’m approaching this wrong by using MS word in the first place. Would be absolutely amazing if I could save all the commands on standby, then run them at the same time. By end of the school program, we’re talking like 100 chapters from multiple books, so anything that lets me just nuke huge batches of BS as quickly as possible and dive right into the listening would be a godsend.
Thanks all!!
There are regex tutorials online, and you can test your regex there.
I’d say, since you’re learning, this could be an opportunity that may be useful later.
Just start with one relatively simple thing, like maybe copyright stuff. Work on getting regex to match that properly throughout a doc, and enjoy the improvement. Then when ready, tackle the next thing.