New to all this...

[Morrile]

Well after saying hello I was advised to post question here, so here goes

I have some paperback books which are no longer published, I have scanned every page into PDF and Word. Paperback pages are justified with the book title and page numbers on every page, but not in the form of header and footer.

So how do I proceed to convert these into a format suitable for e-books?

[HarryT]

The first thing to do is to remove the title and page numbers with "search and replace" in Word. Once you have a "clean" text you can easily convert it to your choice of eBook formats - ePub, Mobi, or whatever.

[Morrile]

Hello Harry

Many thanks, but what about justified text? as some text has been split with a hyphen, so the text doesn't flow

[HarryT]

You'll have to fix that kind of thing by hand.

[Morrile]

thanks Harry, it looks like I have a lot of work ahead

[HarryT]

Creating a good looking eBook is a lot of work, I'm afraid. You can automate a lot of it, but at the end of the day it takes "human judgement" to decide what looks good and what doesn't.

[Morrile]

I think I was making the usual assumption that one could just import a PDF file and the software would convert everything for you.

Thanks for being honest.

Morrile

[HarryT]

It's your choice of PDF as a starting format that's the fundamental problem. A PDF file isn't a "book" - it doesn't contain paragraphs, sentences, or even words, as any normal text document does; it's purely drawing instructions of the form "draw this shape at these coordinates".

For future reference, you'll probably get much better results if you start with a good OCR program (Abbey FineReader works great) rather than with PDF.

[thinkpad]

If you're formatting for the Kindle this page might help.
http://kindleformatting.com/

I was thinking of picking this up as a reference when going ahead with book formatting.

[sherya mathur]

hi
If you want to formatting pdf to E-book. then if you are creating index for that E-book then you will find that is suitable format for utilizing.By index we will do search ,count & read.

[Solitaire1]

Originally Posted by HarryT

It's your choice of PDF as a starting format that's the fundamental problem. A PDF file isn't a "book" - it doesn't contain paragraphs, sentences, or even words, as any normal text document does; it's purely drawing instructions of the form "draw this shape at these coordinates".

For future reference, you'll probably get much better results if you start with a good OCR program (Abbey FineReader works great) rather than with PDF.

To piggyback on HarryT's comments, I treat PDF as a final destination format. Although it is possible to extract text from a PDF I don't count on it. Rather, I save my ebooks in another format (OpenDocument Text) and use that as a source to generate my ebooks as a PDF.

Instead of using PDF like a text format that can be reformatted and altered, I use PDF as electronic paper. I format them for my reader's screen size and they display exactly as formatted on my reader's default size (Small). One of PDF's major strengths is that it gives you complete format control over your ebooks.

Like with printing on paper, if I want to make a change in my ebooks (such as increase the font size or the space between paragraphs) I change the source document and then regenerate the PDF. Although my reader is capable of reflowing PDFs to increase the font size, I've been dissatisfied with the way my PDF look when reflowed.

[Morrile]

Thanks folks!