Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
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.
|
As I said, I suspect we have a different definition of hand formatting. You can run ten books a day through software and spit out the results and post them online. You can even call it hand formatting. I don't call that hand formatting. It is of course no different from what Manybooks.net does, only they have over 23,000 separate books in a lot of file types. That's different file types for each and every book counting as one book. And their mobi files (which is what I read) don't have pre-determined settings which deprive me of choosing my own.
It's not humanly possible to hand format ten books per day if you're actually hand formatting them. Which involves reading them, selectively formatting the text, creating one or more tables of contents, possibly linking to and from footnotes, reading the book and checking for and fixing errors.