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Old 10-03-2008, 11:34 AM   #78
starrigger
Jeffrey A. Carver
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Quote:
Originally Posted by koland View Post
Why not just convert the PDF directly to html (free w/ mobicreator or many other tools)? You can then just read it into word (or even do a direct to mobi conversion, hopefully after fixing that one type you've found so far). Another benefit would be you could switch to a different editor than Word and perhaps avoid all the hidden text problems of before).
You make it sound so easy...

No, it's not that easy. I tried feeding the PDF to MobiCreator, and what I got was a mess. Broken lines, merged lines, lots of other things. I've tried other PDF-to-Word converters, and not one of them worked worth a damn. At least not on my files. (The one exception, which initially made me think, wow, great, was Seas of Ernathe. I don't know why it worked on that and not others.) Maybe there's one out there that works, but I got tired of looking. The full version of Acrobat might work, but I don't have that.

If I wanted to switch from Word, I wouldn't need that as an excuse. My problems with hidden text weren't a Word issue per se, but rather a Wordstar to Word conversion issue. Now that I know how to look for it, I'm not so concerned about it. Anyway, I have no serious problems with Word, and it's the industry standard--not just in fiction, but other areas I occasionally work in.

Quote:
It is too bad that publishers are still somewhat in the dark ages when it comes to the final stages of editing a text; perhaps wide spread adoption of epub may someday fix that (although not likely if MS does their usual proprietary implemenation of such).
I don't know what you mean by this, other than that it would be nice if they gave back to the author the final markup in an editable form. (At least they've finally started making a PDF available. That's new.) I'm completely in the dark as to how adopting epub would affect this. Can you explain?
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