Weeds among the wheat

Spent the last two and a half days trying to convert the typescript of a previously published novel – written on our last-but-one computer using now outdated software – into a usable format for putting on my website as an e-book.
It seemed like a bright idea at the time, and a friend had a computer that could read it and was confident we could convert it into the right kind of file.
But somehow the original text had got peppered with blocks of html – supposedly intelligible language for computers but gobbledegook to humans – and was randomly scattered with symbols borrowed from other keyboards, letters from Scandinavian languages, and Spanish punctuation marks.
It turned out to be a marathon of proofreading, line justifying, and generally trying to get it to look like a book written in English – which is what it was originally in its published version.
Every time I thought it was okay now, either Judy or I would spot a square or a dot or a letter with a circle above it or a squiggle beneath it, or an archaic diphthong or two in the middle of a word.
It made me think of Jesus’ story about the weeds in the wheat: a farmer sowed a field full of healthy wheat seed in clean soil, but when it sprouted he saw that his arch-rival had played a malicious trick. Under cover of darkness, he had come and sown quantities of weed seeds in the same field.
Now the wheat was growing but so were the weeds.
The farm labourers were going to go in and pull up the weeds, to give the wheat space to grow, but the farmer stopped them. He said, ‘If you pull up the weeds before the wheat is mature, you’ll uproot the wheat as well. Leave it till harvest time, then you can pull up the weeds and burn them, and harvest the wheat safely.’
The moral of the story?
Don’t know.
The original one meant ‘don’t judge too soon’, probably. Human beings are all a mixture of good and bad. Rooting out the bad elements in the world would mean uprooting everybody. Let everyone mature: the bad will become worse, the good will grow stronger, and it’ll become far more obvious who is growing fruitfully and who’s just taking up space in the soil and becoming ever more prickly and hard to live alongside.
I hope my book is intelligible to human readers now, though I suspect I’ve missed a few blips and hieroglyphs along the way and reading it as an e-book may require the practice of some forgiveness.
If so, it will sort the readers into two categories: the ones who have faith that the original seed was good and it’s worth persevering in order to enjoy the story through to its fulfilment, and the ones who get put off by the presence of word-weeds in the text and don’t hang around till harvest time but give up on the field and miss the crop.
The weeding took me a long time.
I hope the result is worth the effort.
But if there’s going to be a next time, I’m praying for new technology or better skills. Proofreading is always concentrated work – but it’d be nice to work in a wheatfield with fewer weeds!