I'm working on converting a set of public-domain children's books (Berle's Self Culture, which AFAIK isn't available in any of the current PD collections) which include stories, poetry, songs and so on. I'm not sure what to do with the songs. I've attached a sample page.
I'm using ABBYY Finereader 7.0 Pro. I'm still debating what formats to use for final output; right now, I'm planning to export to Word and do more editing in that, and then take it to BookDesigner rather than Calibre, because there's a lot of formatting involved. (Poetry. Calibre doesn't deal well with poetry.)
I could:
- Make the music sections images, which makes them not searchable. If I wanted them to look nice, I'd have to do a lot of speckle cleanup.
- Make the music part image and the words, words, set over the images--I can do this in Word or PDF, but have no idea how well it'd be supported in most ebook formats. Seems unlikely to work well, especially as it'd be difficult to line up the word with the notes. Still, if I do a PDF version, this method would be preferable for that.
- Make a line of music-image, then text, then music-image underneath that, and lose the connection between the treble & bass clefs. Allows the music to be included, but still has the problem of lining up the words.
- Major edit: Make the music part all image, and include the text of the verses underneath that. That moves away from being an accurate re-creation.
As it stands, I'm not planning on doing a gutenberg-style re-creation. Not capturing line breaks for prose, not including page numbers and headers. Advice or suggestions are welcome. (Even if I don't wind up using any of them because I'm sure someone else will want ideas for different projects with similar issues.)