Quote:
Originally Posted by teh603
Nuclear reformatting can't be that hard. Open the document in a word processor, copy into notepad, paste, save as .txt. Done in less than five minutes. Hopefully they didn't use a bizarre word processor like Appleworks 16 (as in Apple IIgs era), Symentec GreatWorks, or Nissus Writer.
|
Quark Xpress was common for print formatting. So was Pagemaker. These are both convertible today, but the actual formatting would need to be redone from scratch. Some of the other formats are now entirely inaccessible; the easiest way to convert is chop-and-scan a physical copy, OCR and proofread, and again, reformat entirely.
Getting a TXT file is relatively easy; resetting chapter headings, scene breaks inside a chapter, indented quotes, and so on is several hours per book. Not awful for any company that's budgeted for the time, but if there's only a limited labor pool, it's going to be focused on new works, not converting old ones, except when there's particular demand.
Quote:
|
The only surprise here is that the authors didn't try doing this earlier. It doesn't take much to generate a PDF; the classic Macs had an rdev called Print2PDF as early as the late '90s that could generate a PDF of any word processing document.
|
"Late 90's" was not long ago in the print industry. And although many books were converted & printed from PDFs, they weren't retained after the print run was finished. File storage was a lot more expensive (not that any one book cost too much to retain but saving them *all* would require both drive space and some kind of archiving system, both of which were resources publishers didn't want to bother with). And besides, once the decision was made to stop printing entirely, why retain a copy? It'd have to be reformatted if the print run were redone anyway, potentially with a new introduction and such, maybe new fonts, possibly errata changes. The print-ready PDF wasn't the file they'd be most likely to save.