Okay, I’ve got a crappy reprint of a book from 1948 (the reprint was done in the 1980’s on a photocopier and the book was originally written in 1882) that I’m transcribing into MS Word so that I can turn it into an e-book and put it on the net. (It’s a fantastic book, but no one sells it in any form other than the crappy photocopy version, and there’s no copies of it on the net, even though the book is in the public domain.)
One thing that I want to do with this is have it available in two forms. The first being the entire book as one giant file (and since the book’s 589 pages with illustrations the file’s going to be pretty goodly sized by the time I’m done with it) and the second with the book broken up so that each chapter is a seperate file. How do I do this? I’m planning on turning the whole thing into a .PDF file when I’m done, so is there a way I can do it in Acrobat or can I do it in Word? (I’m using Office 2000 BTW.)
Secondly, I’m trying to keep the same formatting “feel” that the hard copy has, so I’m using a similar font to the paper edition and it’s got a lot of words in small caps, is there a “hot key” combination I can use to get this? Or do I have to keep hitting the drop-down menu and selecting it?
Why don’t you just do the whole thing in chapters? For people who want to download the whole thing at once you can put all the .PDF files in an archive (Winzip or something). Alternatively, the full version of Acrobat can take multiple chapters and distill them all as a big document, IIRC.
Good for you! Have you thought of putting out a plain-text version and donating it to Project Gutenberg? They’re always glad to get contributions.
I’ll second Urban Ranger’s suggestion to do the project by chapters. The smaller files load faster, and almost anything you do will go quicker and smoother.
Once you have the entire text typed out into a text editor, you can convert it any which way you like. Making different sets of full, chapterwise, .doc, .pdf won’t be that difficult.
To begin with, you can just type (I’m assuming you’re not scanning the book) the book in chapter wise. So now you already have your chapterwise set. You can then merge all the chapters into the Full set. Zip that single huge file and you should be able to compress it manifold. Converting from .doc to .pdf can be done.
One more extremely useful suggestion (here again, I’m assuming you’re actually typing out the whole text) : Use a software called Flashpeak UltimaShell from http://www.flashpeak.com/ushell/ushell.htm
It’ll save you hours, if not days, on your typing work. Basically it autocompletes words, phrases, sentences for you… and learns new words as you type.
This may be redundant, superfluous, or not as good as what other posters have suggested but I haven’t seen it mentioned yet.
If you’re putting individual chapters in their own files, you can merge them into one file quite easily later on. For instance, open up a new document, and go to Insert, File… you can do this several times in a row, and you’ll have all of your chapters in one place.
It is is possible to have Word (2000, I think, but possibly in other versions) print directly to a PDF file. I believe the software is called something like “PDF Printer”. I don’t know much, but I know it’s out there… Good luck!