As part of my unending civic campaign to raise awareness for a worthy but forgotten NYC historical figure, I want to duplicate and distribute copies of an unpublished 40-year-old PhD dissertation that was written about the person. While the work is not exactly a page-turner, it is the only serious cradle-to-grave study of the guy ever written, so getting it out there would fill a big void in the urban history universe.
I have contacted the author, and he has essentially given me the green light to do what I want with his work.
I want to convert the typewritten manuscript into a digital doc that can be 1. downloaded from the web and 2. copied to a DVD. I want the end-user to then be able to read the doc on his PC or print it out in attractive hard-copy form. Naturally, the dissertation has footnotes which would have to be handled somehow. There are no graphs or diagrams, though I would like to insert pictures that are not already there.
I have a copy of the typewritten dissertation. I have a PC with OCR software. I have a scanner.
How should I proceed? I was thinking up all sorts of ideas myself before I realized that this sort of problem must come up thousands of times in the academic world, so why reinvent the wheel, right? Let me ask somebody. Then, I figured, if anyone knows about this sort of thing, it’s my fellow Dopers. So, any advice?
Why not a PDF? That way it would be preserved exactly as on the page and could be downloaded and all that. That’s how new dissertations are being electronically published. Or am I missing a step?
PDF may be the way to go, but frankly, I’m pretty new to the format, so please go bear with me.
First of all, I do not want to preserve the original typewritten-style (“currier”) mono-spaced text that goes on for 400 pages. I want the characters to be typeset the way a modern wordprocessing program formats text – so it looks like the lettering in a newspaper or a book.
Okay, so I convert the manuscript into a “typeset-style” format using my scanner and Word. How do I turn that into PDF? Don’t I have to buy special software? And is that software tricky to use?
There are various free PDF converters. I use PrimoPDF, but there are several others. Just install the software onto your computer; the PDF writer will show up among your printers. Print it using that and you’re set (it doesn’t actually print, but rather “prints” (i.e., saves) it as a PDF).
For the formatting, I’d scan it into Word. You can then format it into whatever font you like.
As for the footnotes, Word has a footnoting function; you can use it and then cut and paste the footnote text (which will appear sequentially as the scanner found it) into the Word footnote. It will be a time-consuming process, but once you’ve done it, you don’t have to worry about how the footnotes fall.
I assume that the dissertation you’re talking about is:
THE PUBLIC CAREER OF ANDREW HASWELL GREEN
by MAZARAKI, GEORGE ALEXANDER, PHD
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, 1966, 399 pages
Is this the one?
If it is, are you aware that a scanned, pdf copy of this dissertation is available free from UMI ProQuest Digital Dissertations?
All you need to do is go to a university library that has a UMI ProQuest subscription and download it.
I just downloaded a copy and ran a few pages through the OCR function in Adobe Acrobat Pro, and it worked fine. If you like, i can OCR the whole thing and email it to you. It would certainly be quicker than scanning 400-odd pages.
I knew it was available from UMI in hard-copy version, but not in downloadable form.
Boy, it would be great if you could email me a file of the OCR-ed text. I was not looking forward to scanning those 400 pages. Click on my SDMB name (at the top left of this post) and the links will take you to my email address.