I was able to get a college textbook that I want to use in one of my classes. It’s available under a creative commons license.
I would like to edit the book to reflect my students better. I want to take out some chapters to shorten it (it’s 290 pages). I want to change the pictures to represent them and make some changes to some of the wording. the problem I’m having is that I was only able to get the book as a PDF or as a series of .html documents and separate files for the pictures. I have adobe Acrobat Pro and can technically export the PDF to Word but I’m then left with stripping out 290 pages worth of “relics”. The .html docs are interesting and I could cut and paste them into word but them I would have to go in and change all the formatting, which is doable but not great.
My goals are: A dynamic Table of Contents, dynamic page numbering, and consistent formatting. I also don’t really want to have to change all the headings to the weird blue color just to get my Table of Contents (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3).
I’m a quick learner but generally brute force things to make Word and Adobe fit my needs. Maybe I need a different program? Maybe their is an easy way to manipulate .html docs? Maybe I’m dreaming and I’m going to be spending the next month highlighting headings and changing fonts.
Word is probably a good choice if you aren’t doing anything fancy and if you aren’t too worried about outputting files that a print service will like.
Word can handle things like the table of contents if you know how to use those features. They’re not hard to learn, but if your document is not already using consistent styles or you have to add manual bookmarks, it can take time. (Still, it’s a lot less time than manually updating a TOC).
If you’re doing any kind of professional work, the standard nowadays is Adobe InDesign. I don’t have much experience with it - I used Quark XPress for a decade, but got out of fancy publishing layouts just as InDesign was coming on the scene. Quark is still around, but it’s a stunning example of how you can go from dominating a field to “who’s that?” in ten years or less.
My approach for a task like this, regardless of software would be this:
get a plain-text version of the document, perhaps by copy/pasting from the HTML docs.
get all the images into folders, perhaps one per chapter. This should be easy from the HTML versions.
Get your styles set up properly. Don’t just format text as you go - you want to actually define your styles, including multiple heading styles and all of your numbered or bulleted lists. TOC needs this in most programs. Setting up the styles may be easiest using a few pages of your real content, or perhaps just gibberish filler text. The key is not the text, it’s the styles.
Once your styles are in place, import (copy/paste) all that plain text, and I really do mean plain text. All of your formatting needs to be done with styles.
Apply styles to the text, checking periodically to be sure that your TOC is updating like you expect it to.
Add images.
Make manual adjustments until you’re happy with the fine details.
Send it to a printer who will complain that you used Word and will suggest InDesign. More seriously, if you will be printing it, you should actually talk to the printer early on in the project to find out what they need from you. Maybe it won’t be an issue.
Can’t Acrobat remove pages all by itself? You probably want to make that your first step, to bring the size down to something more manageable before adding all the other features you want.
Break it up into chapters. Cut out one chapter at a time and work on that. Then Word will not freak out!
When done print out one chapter at a time or paste it all back together into one large file.
Also might want to talk to book publishing businesses and hear what suggestion they have.
So far as pictures, use something like Adobe Photoshop to reduce the image size, THEN paste it into the document. If you stick a bunch of large resized pictures into Word, it can slow things down. The file sizes remain the same.
More seriously, if you will be printing it, you should actually talk to the printer early on in the project to find out what they need from you. Maybe it won’t be an issue.