Quote:
Originally Posted by cmbs
Patricia - I confess to being puzzled as to how you can claim to hand format 10 books every day. Even the easiest books take me a day to hand format, then several days reading to check for errors. Seems we just don't understand each other very well. I suspect our definition of "hand formatting" differs.
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I have no idea how Patricia hand formats her books; I do know that when I have time for it (i.e. not on weekdays), in one day I can format several novel-length works to PDF layout of my choice, or PRC for ereader. Working from FineReader exports takes a bit longer, because FR does some odd things with formatting (it's prone to creating text boxes instead of inline text), but I could still do a small handful in a day, including checking the OCR against the scanned tifs.
Macros help, and knowing find/replace tricks that work, and styles, and having a single layout goal, and practice with similar works. Anything you do a hundred times gets smoother; you notice potential slowdowns early, and develop ways to work around some of them. Good software helps. Good
hardware helps--a desk at the right height so your back doesn't get sore after the first hour, a mouse at the right angle so your wrist doesn't hurt, and so on.
Ten a day doesn't sound at all extreme for someone who's both talented and experienced at ebook conversion. Presumably, textbooks or books with lots of diagrams or links or odd formatting would take a bit longer--but even those can have streamlined processes, if one deals with enough of them.