[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by WV-Mike

I recently made my first eBook using Sigil.

Fantastic! Congrats.

And welcome to the forum.

Originally Posted by WV-Mike

From print to ePub - how I did it.

[...]

What would make this process simpler and more efficient?

Boy, oh boy... Well, you've come to the right place.

I've been writing about this stuff extensively since 2012.

For some of the most recent topics, see:

• 2020: "OCRing + EPUBing my first book: Tips?"
• 2022: "Converting PDF to EPUB and automatically creating popup footnotes"

and, just last week, I wrote an even bigger summary here which linked to even more of the previous threads:

• 2023: "How to extract footnotes from pdf?"
  
  • About PDF->EPUB
    
  • + problems that crop up with footnotes -> ebooks, and how to deal with them.
    

That should hold you over on all OCRing + PDF->EPUB + DOCX->EPUB info for... oh, about 100 years.

Originally Posted by JSWolf

It will add all kinds of errors and Acrobat 6 is an old version and may noot OCR all that well. Get a good OCR program and use that instead.

Yes, exactly.

I looked up the date, and looks like Adobe Acrobat 6 was from 2003! My gods, there has been multiple GENERATIONAL leaps in OCR quality since then.

Getting much more accurate OCR is one of the biggest and most important steps you can do, because EVERY further stage will be based on how clean your initial text is.

You can see the post I wrote about how important accurate OCR is:

• 2014: "Can you OCR the images inside of .pdf files?"

When you're creating ebooks... it's not JUST the raw text you have to worry about, but correctly recognizing all the formatting too:

• Bold / Italics
• Superscripts / Subscripts
• Lists
• Tables
• Images
• Headers / Footers
• [...]