A quick guide to creating ePubs from printed books

1v4n0 · 12-10-2019, 01:15 PM

Hello everyone. I have written, for another, less expert community than this one, a guide for newbies to the creation of e-books.

I post is here hoping to reach some more beginners. I hope this is the right place to do it.

A QUICK GUIDE TO CREATING EPUBS FROM PRINTED BOOKS

Contents:
0. What's this about
1. The tools
2. Scanning
3. The corrections
4. Formatting the ODT
5. Formatting the EPUB
6. A note on footnotes

0. What's this about

In this guide I'll try to explain how to create an epub ebook starting from a printed book (or image files). Epubs are easily converted to kindle ebooks, and between the two formats they cover most (if not all) of the readers available.

I've been doing this for a few years and I've learned some tricks, which I want to share with you. I've also learned that there's quite many people who are doing the same thing: they're the ones to thank for most of the unofficial ebooks you find online. The job is relatively easy once you learn how to do it, and it can take as little as a few hours – for a short, simple book and with a good scanner – to dozens of hours for complicated ones with varying formatting, lots of footnotes, bad printing, a slow scanner and so on.

I have never made any money from it.

1. The tools
What you will need.

- A book. Shocking, I know. Though the guide works as well if you have someone else doing the scanning for you, and there are quite many image-pdf files floating around the web.

- A scanner. I've always used super-cheap ones, which do a decent job. You can spend as much money as you want on them. The fanciest ones are indeed much faster and don't require pushing the book against the glass (and thus potentially damaging it). However from my experience the time you save on scanning is really not much, when you compare it to the rest of the operations. The most time-consuming part is certainly not scanning the book. Professional copy machines, such as the ones used in schools or libraries, are also a faster option. If you can sacrifice the book you can cut the pages loose and the copy machine can scan it recto/verso.

- An OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). This is where the magic happens, and the images turn into text. I use Abby Finereader and it works fine. The Mac OS version doesn't have the same versatility of the Windows one, but despite that AFR remains probably the best OCR software available.

- A text-editing software. I use Open Office. Others suggest using Atlantis, for which you don't need epub-conversion add-ons. For Mac OS there's Pages, a text-editor which creates very clean epub files.

- In case you use Open Office, you need a few add-ons: Pepito Cleaner https://pepitoweb.altervista.org/pep...aner/index.php and Writer2Epub https://writer2epub.it/download/ .

- Epub-editing software: Sigil https://sigil-ebook.com/ and Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/download (and yes, it's much better to have them both).

- A software for automatically clicking through repetitive tasks. This can be very useful, and at times indispensable. I use PTFB.

- It is not a tool, strictly speaking, but Mobileread is the place to go for any doubts on the creation of ebooks. There's tons of very useful info, including an awesome thread just for regular expressions to use on Sigil, and from my experience the people there, besides being incredibly knowledgeable, are very friendly and always willing to help.

2. Scanning
The books should be clean and without any signs, and especially without any underlining or writing on the printed area. Erasing them before you start scanning might seem like a chore, but it will save you much time and headaches later on.

Scan at 300 dpi gray-scale.

If you use a normal, flat scanner, be sure to press the book hard against the surface of the scanner, so as to avoid distortion in the images. Also don't move it while scanning. If you happen to move it repeat the scanning. Finereader has an option for automatically keep scanning, without having to click again for each page.

Then select the language or languages you want and feed the images to the OCR. Scanning and reading can be done in one single step with Finereader.

If your book features some special characters which are not part of the default alphabet and which are repeated many times, you can train Finereader to recognize them (very common, for example, is some publishers using “í” instead of “ì”). Here is a short explanation on how to do it.

If you don't scan using Finereader you get image files, most typically JPEGS or PDFs, which you can then feed to AFR.

3. The corrections
This is one of the crucial parts. Once Finereader has finished “digesting” the book, you have to manually check each page for errors (and, very important, check that you did indeed scan all of the book's pages). Also, remove any white pages, because they can create problems later on.

Finereader assigns four “area-types” to the images it reads (text, table, image, barcode). At times the type it chooses might not be the best one for you, so check that too. Also check the image-areas cover the right area. Finereader, anyway, has quite many options you can fiddle around with.

The characters which the software is not sure of are highlighted (by default in light-blue), and the words that the spellcheck doesn't recognize are underlined in red. Arm yourself with some patience, and slowly go through all the pages. This is where a big part of the difference is made between a good and a bad ebook, as most of the errors do indeed show up here. The Mac version of AFR doesn't allow editing at this stage, so any modification has to be done at the next stage.

This is also where I set up parts of the formatting, using some personal code. I type in some specific strings before each part which I want to come up with special formatting in the final file. For example, I write XXX before all the titles that I will turn to main headings (H1 in html, such as chapter titles), YYY for sub-headings, +++ before the paragraphs that have a bigger margin above them, CIT and TIC before and after the quotations, if those paragraphs have a specific format (as they do in most cases), and so on. This makes all those parts easier to identify later in the process. Note that this step is not needed for headings that already start with a specific string (most typically “chapter”, “part”, or “number+period”). Make sure you choose unique strings, that are not found elsewhere in the book.

This is also where I set up the footnotes, if they're at the bottom of each page and not at the end of the book or of the chapter. For footnotes see the specific section below. AFR is not particularly good at managing footnotes on its own.

Once you've checked all the pages the worst is over, and you can save the document. For reasons I haven't really understood, I think I've found it's better to save the document as HTML, and then to open the HTML file with Open Office and save it as ODT. Don't delete the Finereader document. It will be very useful as reference for the next steps. Only get rid of it once the book is done.

You can also save the file directly as epub, and skip step number 3. In that case you obviously need to do most of the editing from the epub file.

4. Formatting the ODT
Once you have the ODT file, run Pepito Cleaner (which is basically a pre-compiled regex bundle) and check the major and most common imperfections: lines that start with a lowercase letter, lines that end without punctuation, dashes within the words, space before punctuation, and a few more. Then search, still from Pepito, for all the lines that start with XXX (from the third tab in Pepito search for “^XXX”) and turn them into H1 headings; do the same for H2 and lower, if there's any. Then bulk-remove those markers (from Open Office's search and replace tool, checking the “regex” box just in case there's some instances of those strings within the text: search for ^XXX and replace with empty field).

Sometimes AFR omits chunks of text, even if it has recognized them. This usually shows up while running Pepito. Be sure to always pay attention to what you're doing, and to check that it all makes sense. Reading parts of the text you're working on can help you detect errors that otherwise would go unnoticed.

Also remove the cover from the ODT file (it works better if you only add it while creating the epub file), and make sure all image files are hosted within the document and are not linked (from Open Office: edit → links → remove links).

The ODT is also the stage where footnotes are inserted, if in the printed book they are listed at the end of each page. See specific section.

At this point run Writer2Epub. The interface has very few options and they are rather self-explanatory. I always choose to have a table of contents automatically created, and to split the files at H1 headings (splitting the file results in interrupting the flow of the text in the final epub file). Select the cover by browsing through your files (if you had saved the file as HTML it should be in the filename_files folder), and be sure to fill in the metadata. The rest is up to you.

The automatically-created table of contents might not be exactly the same as the one in the printed book. You can edit that later on to make it match the original.

5. Formatting the EPUB

Now you have your epub: give it its final touches. First of all, to make things a bit simpler, open it with the Calibre editor and click on tools → remove unused CSS rules. Sigil has a similar tool, but I believe Calibre's is more thorough.

If you saved the epub directly from AFR, there is a bit more editing to be done at this stage. Saving the default searches and the most commonly used CSS styles will spare you a lot of time and many mistakes.

Search for the special strings that you had inserted from Finereader: all the paragraphs that start with “+++” (search: “+++” and “+++” and replace with “” and “”); search for all the text within the CIT/TIC markers and place it within a specifically-classed div (select “regex” from the search tool, search for “CIT(.*?)TIC” and replace it with “<div class="cit">\1</div>”; there could be more, but these are the most common ones. (Note that in the latter case the CIT/TIC markers must not be in italics, because in that case the regex would miss it). You can save these searches so for the next books you don't need to type them in manually. Of course then you need to style these classes from the epub's CSS file. I just give some margin-top to the former and some margin all around for the latter, maybe reducing the font-size a bit too. This is up to you anyway, as is the case with all the styling you can use, adding fonts (very easy from the Calibre editor), and so on.

More default searches that I find useful: replace “ -(\w)” with “ - \1”, and “,” with “,”.

The Calibre editor also makes it very easy to split the epub's XHTML files, which usually comes in handy for the first and the last pages of the book (most typically to have a separate page for the book's flap and/or back cover, for its description, the copyright stuff and so on).

For those books that have an analytical index, Sigil has a very useful tool that automatically creates one, based on a list you provide (tools → index → index editor) . The problem is that populating that list is usually a very long copy/pasting chore, because most of the time the list is very long. This is where the auto-click software comes in handy. Launch it, record the actions while you copy/paste one item, and then click your way through the rest of the index. Once the list is done click on “create index”, and hey!, the analytical index is served. Getting to know exactly how this tool works might take some fiddling around, but it's very easy. Hover over the column titles in the index editor for a quick explanation. Two tips: 1) The index is case-sensitive, so if you want to index words that are not proper names add (?i) before the “text to include” field; 2) The index matches all the strings that contain that string, so if you want “White” to match only “White” and not “SWhite” or “Whites”, use “\WWhite\W”.

At this stage you can also insert some internal links (for references as “see above”, “see page X”, “see chapter Y” and so on). This is easier to do from Sigil, which has a quick option to insert ids and links. Place an id in the position you want to link to, and a link where you want the user to be able to click.

Once this is done comes another thankless and important part, the spellcheck. Both Sigil and Calibre have it, but I like the latter a bit more. Load the spellcheck and manually run through all the words it doesn't recognize. They can be in the thousands, and most of them are false positives. Scroll the list one word at a time. Then do it again, and again until you don't find one single word that shouldn't be there.

And finally the last step is the debugger. Both Sigil and Calibre have one, but Calibre's is much better and more thorough. See what problems it finds and fix them one at a time.

Ideally, before publishing the ebook, you should also read it: from my experience it is virtually impossible to obtain a completely error-free ebook, no matter how careful you are.

And that's it, the ebook is ready now. What to do with it now is up to you. For English-language books one great website where you can share it is mobilism, but creating a torrent, and/or using Soulseek, is also a viable option.

6. A note on footnotes
Non-fiction books often feature footnotes. Here's how I deal with them.

1) If the notes are at the bottom of each page.

In this case the process starts while correcting the Finereader document. Cut/paste each note from the bottom of the page to the position of its reference within the text, wrapping it within a specific string that you're sure is not used elsewhere in the book. So instead of having the normal flow of the text with some numbers in apex to signal the presence of a note, and at the end of each page the single notes, you get something like “text text###footnote here### text continuing”. This copy-pasting can be made a bit faster with the auto-click software: cut the note, place the cursor where you're going to paste it, launch PTFB, start recording a screen macro, paste the note within the marker-string, stop the recording.

Then follow the steps as I said above, until you get the clean and ready ODT file. At this point launch Open Office's search tool, select “more options” and check “regular expression”, and search for “###(.*?)###. This will select the text contained within those markers.

(Note that this doesn't search through paragraphs: if your note spans more than one paragraph, what you can do is making it one single paragraph, marking the “new line” with a specific string, and then replacing that string, from the epub, with “”).

Cut the selection, click on insert → footnote, paste it, and search again. This is where PTFB really becomes useful, and saves you a lot of time. Record a macro of these last operations, and then click your way through the book. Don't do it blindly though, and check you're always actually doing it right. When you're done, use the search and replace tool to remove all instances of the marker-string.

Now the ODT has the footnotes in their place, and Writer2Epub will automatically render them when creating the epub. You can then style them with CSS.

2) If the footnotes are at the end of each chapter or of the book

If they are listed at the end of each chapter you just need some regex wisdom and some search and replace in the epub file. Usually they will be marked by a number in apex (with tags) within the text, and by the same number, in apex or not, before each note. You just need to interlink them, and these are the regexs I use:

Search

([0-9]{1,})(.*?)

Replace

<a href="#t-\1" id="fn-\1">\1</a>\2<a href="#t-\1">←</a>

and

search

([0-9]{1,})

replace

<a href="#fn-\1" id="t-\1">\1</a>

The former links the notes to their references within the text, and the latter links the references to the notes. Before you run the search and replace though, I advise you to count all the instances of the string (Sigil has an option for that), possibly for one chapter at a time to make it easier, and check if the numbers match. Very often there's missing numbers, bad-formatted paragraphs, and so on. Find out where the errors are, fix them, and when everything is set go for it.

These regexs might need some minor tweaking depending on the book, but that's the gist of it. As I said in the introduction, for any doubts check and/or ask on mobileread, or maybe just google “regex cheatsheet”.

If the notes are listed at the end of the book, probably the easiest way is manually cut/pasting them at the end of each chapter, from the epub file, and then doing what I just described above.

Another option, for books with many footnotes, is running AFR twice, once for the text, without the notes, and another time for the notes, without the text. This way you end up with two separate epub files, which then you have to merge and interlink, more or less as said above in case #2. Sigil has a plugin to automatize this task, but doing it manually can be useful for one more check.

Quoth · 12-10-2019, 02:02 PM

First make sure the book is out of copyright, now public domain, as otherwise copying more than few pages is copyright violation. A civil offence in most countries, despite what Google thinks.

I save & edit in ODT. But you need to save as in .docx for best conversion in Calibre. Writer2Epub is a waste of time compared to using Calibre. It's much poorer at converting styles.

Also use LibreOffice, not OpenOffice, it's nearly history.

Proofread, annotate, edit, re-export many times before sharing a PD work.

And no, cheap scanners ARE slow and poor compared with SCSI and Ethernet professional models. If it's not a rare book and it's PD and your own then cut binding using an industrial guillotine. Then use the sheet feeder. Do a typical page to create a profile with suitable gamma, brightness, contrast. Some books need scanned at 600 DPI.

PeterT · 12-10-2019, 02:37 PM

This might be better suited to being added to the MobileRead Wiki

John F · 12-12-2019, 07:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

First make sure the book is out of copyright, now public domain, as otherwise copying more than few pages is copyright violation. A civil offence in most countries, despite what Google thinks.

...

Is this true? People format format shift ebooks (mobi -> epub, epub->epub, ...), can't you format shift pbooks you own to ebooks?

DiapDealer · 12-12-2019, 09:18 AM

Moderator Notice
Two comments that could be construed as encouraging users to download cracked versions of copyrighted software have been removed.

Besides being against MR rules to encourage such things, the comments were completely unnecessary/unrelated to your otherwise very helpful instructions. In the future, please refrain from suggesting people try to obtain cracked copies of copyrighted software for any reason.

Quoth · 12-12-2019, 09:18 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John F

Is this true? People format format shift ebooks (mobi -> epub, epub->epub, ...), can't you format shift pbooks you own to ebooks?

It's not been tested apart from the attempt to take Google to court, which failed.
Most printed books specifically forbid electronic storage in the Copyright terms.

It's a media & format conversion of a physical hard to duplicate copy to an easy to copy electronic version. It's not a format shift like even a Kindle book with DRM to epub for your own use. What if Amazon abandon the Kindle? Or Adobe turns off the DRM servers like Amazon did for mobi with DRM. It's not at all similar to ripping your own CDs to your own MP3/FLAC and never sharing them, though that is illegal in some countries and not others.

If you can read, then you can read the original paper edition. Obviously what you do in the privacy of your own home AND DO NOT give a COPY to someone else is for all practical purposes irrelevant.

Also the effort involved transferring a printed book to an ebook is such that the only reasonable motive is to share copies. This should ONLY be done if the book is in the public domain. Google is a serial copyright infringer. In some cases so is the Archive dot Org / Wayback machine.

Though non-destructive non-permanent scanning for the blind (Scan, OCR text and text to speech, but without recording the audio) is probably permitted and has been available for over 30 years. Recently though publishers of Audio books are upset at text to speech. They are VERY annoyed about speech to text (subtitles), which is valid as almost no Audio book doesn't have a cheap eBook version first! Unlike text to speech there is also no real need for it. It's an attempt by Audible (wholly owned by Amazon) to increase market share and sell Amazon products.

John F · 12-12-2019, 09:55 AM

To start, I was referring to books you own with no intent to distribute to others.

Quote:

Originally Posted by FrustratedReader

It's not been tested apart from the attempt to take Google to court, which failed. ...

The Google case seems quite different to me than a personal use case.

Quote:

... Most printed books specifically forbid electronic storage in the Copyright terms. ...

Looking at the copyright statement of a couple of pbooks I own, I don't see any explicit/specific statements to electronic storage.

Quote:

... It's a media & format conversion of a physical hard to duplicate copy to an easy to copy electronic version. It's not a format shift like even a Kindle book with DRM to epub for your own use. ...

I believe you are allowed to format shift CDs to MP3s, Vinyl to MP3, Tape to MP3, ... so I'm not sure about physical to electronic. The "easy to copy" statement seems irrelevant to me, especially since we are talking about personal use.

Quote:

... What if Amazon abandon the Kindle? Or Adobe turns off the DRM servers like Amazon did for mobi with DRM. ...

I'm not sure what that has to do it? If your argument is format shifting for backup in that case, it seeems acceptable to format shift in case your house burns down and your books burn.

Quote:

It's not at all similar to ripping your own CDs to your own MP3/FLAC and never sharing them, though that is illegal in some countries and not others. ...

I'm not sure about CDs, but I believe it is legal to format shift Vinyl , Cassette, ... to electronic formats (in some countries).

Quote:

... Also the effort involved transferring a printed book to an ebook is such that the only reasonable motive is to share copies. This should ONLY be done if the book is in the public domain. ...

I believe that I've read of people on this sight scanning for personal use, which seems in conflict with of "... only reasonable motive is to share copies". It is their pbook, so they can do what they want with it (for personal use), similar to how people format shift ebooks.

And again, I'm talking about personal use, so can we dispense with the Google case.

DiapDealer · 12-12-2019, 10:46 AM

Lotta FUD around here.

I know of no credible theory that people can't legally scan copies of physical books they own for their own personal use.

So long as they are not distributing them in any way, they have nothing to fear.

And this thread is about the personal use of scanned copies of personally owned physical books. So any activities by any big bad scary corporate overlords is irrelevant to the discussion.

pwalker8 · 12-12-2019, 01:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

Lotta FUD around here.

I know of no credible theory that people can't legally scan copies of physical books they own for their own personal use.

So long as they are not distributing them in any way, they have nothing to fear.

And this thread is about the personal use of scanned copies of personally owned physical books. So any activities by any big bad scary corporate overlords is irrelevant to the discussion.

Yep. The actual right to scan a paper book into ebook format for personal use has never been explicitly tested in court, though it follows from the Sony case (recording a tv show on video tape to watch later). But that's because no one has actually been sued in such a case. Some companies make all sorts of wild claims. The CEO of Disney once claimed you were stealing from Disney if you didn't watch the commercials. The odds of anyone being sued for scanning a book for personal use is pretty slim.

ps67 · 12-12-2019, 03:27 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pwalker8

... The CEO of Disney once claimed you were stealing from Disney if you didn't watch the commercials.

you can't go to the bathroom during advertising, you have to do it during the movie!

binaryhermit · 12-12-2019, 03:42 PM

good luck enforcing that (even in the unlikely event it's a valid legal theory)

1v4n0 · 12-13-2019, 01:59 AM

Could we stay on topic, please?

pdurrant · 12-13-2019, 05:17 AM

You might like to add your guide to the MobileRead Wiki.

12-10-2019, 01:15 PM	#1
1v4n0 Groupie Posts: 171 Karma: 40000 Join Date: Oct 2013 Device: kindle	A quick guide to creating ePubs from printed books Hello everyone. I have written, for another, less expert community than this one, a guide for newbies to the creation of e-books. I post is here hoping to reach some more beginners. I hope this is the right place to do it. A QUICK GUIDE TO CREATING EPUBS FROM PRINTED BOOKS Contents: 0. What's this about 1. The tools 2. Scanning 3. The corrections 4. Formatting the ODT 5. Formatting the EPUB 6. A note on footnotes 0. What's this about In this guide I'll try to explain how to create an epub ebook starting from a printed book (or image files). Epubs are easily converted to kindle ebooks, and between the two formats they cover most (if not all) of the readers available. I've been doing this for a few years and I've learned some tricks, which I want to share with you. I've also learned that there's quite many people who are doing the same thing: they're the ones to thank for most of the unofficial ebooks you find online. The job is relatively easy once you learn how to do it, and it can take as little as a few hours – for a short, simple book and with a good scanner – to dozens of hours for complicated ones with varying formatting, lots of footnotes, bad printing, a slow scanner and so on. I have never made any money from it. 1. The tools What you will need. - A book. Shocking, I know. Though the guide works as well if you have someone else doing the scanning for you, and there are quite many image-pdf files floating around the web. - A scanner. I've always used super-cheap ones, which do a decent job. You can spend as much money as you want on them. The fanciest ones are indeed much faster and don't require pushing the book against the glass (and thus potentially damaging it). However from my experience the time you save on scanning is really not much, when you compare it to the rest of the operations. The most time-consuming part is certainly not scanning the book. Professional copy machines, such as the ones used in schools or libraries, are also a faster option. If you can sacrifice the book you can cut the pages loose and the copy machine can scan it recto/verso. - An OCR software (Optical Character Recognition). This is where the magic happens, and the images turn into text. I use Abby Finereader and it works fine. The Mac OS version doesn't have the same versatility of the Windows one, but despite that AFR remains probably the best OCR software available. - A text-editing software. I use Open Office. Others suggest using Atlantis, for which you don't need epub-conversion add-ons. For Mac OS there's Pages, a text-editor which creates very clean epub files. - In case you use Open Office, you need a few add-ons: Pepito Cleaner https://pepitoweb.altervista.org/pep...aner/index.php and Writer2Epub https://writer2epub.it/download/ . - Epub-editing software: Sigil https://sigil-ebook.com/ and Calibre https://calibre-ebook.com/download (and yes, it's much better to have them both). - A software for automatically clicking through repetitive tasks. This can be very useful, and at times indispensable. I use PTFB. - It is not a tool, strictly speaking, but Mobileread is the place to go for any doubts on the creation of ebooks. There's tons of very useful info, including an awesome thread just for regular expressions to use on Sigil, and from my experience the people there, besides being incredibly knowledgeable, are very friendly and always willing to help. 2. Scanning The books should be clean and without any signs, and especially without any underlining or writing on the printed area. Erasing them before you start scanning might seem like a chore, but it will save you much time and headaches later on. Scan at 300 dpi gray-scale. If you use a normal, flat scanner, be sure to press the book hard against the surface of the scanner, so as to avoid distortion in the images. Also don't move it while scanning. If you happen to move it repeat the scanning. Finereader has an option for automatically keep scanning, without having to click again for each page. Then select the language or languages you want and feed the images to the OCR. Scanning and reading can be done in one single step with Finereader. If your book features some special characters which are not part of the default alphabet and which are repeated many times, you can train Finereader to recognize them (very common, for example, is some publishers using “í” instead of “ì”). Here is a short explanation on how to do it. If you don't scan using Finereader you get image files, most typically JPEGS or PDFs, which you can then feed to AFR. 3. The corrections This is one of the crucial parts. Once Finereader has finished “digesting” the book, you have to manually check each page for errors (and, very important, check that you did indeed scan all of the book's pages). Also, remove any white pages, because they can create problems later on. Finereader assigns four “area-types” to the images it reads (text, table, image, barcode). At times the type it chooses might not be the best one for you, so check that too. Also check the image-areas cover the right area. Finereader, anyway, has quite many options you can fiddle around with. The characters which the software is not sure of are highlighted (by default in light-blue), and the words that the spellcheck doesn't recognize are underlined in red. Arm yourself with some patience, and slowly go through all the pages. This is where a big part of the difference is made between a good and a bad ebook, as most of the errors do indeed show up here. The Mac version of AFR doesn't allow editing at this stage, so any modification has to be done at the next stage. This is also where I set up parts of the formatting, using some personal code. I type in some specific strings before each part which I want to come up with special formatting in the final file. For example, I write XXX before all the titles that I will turn to main headings (H1 in html, such as chapter titles), YYY for sub-headings, +++ before the paragraphs that have a bigger margin above them, CIT and TIC before and after the quotations, if those paragraphs have a specific format (as they do in most cases), and so on. This makes all those parts easier to identify later in the process. Note that this step is not needed for headings that already start with a specific string (most typically “chapter”, “part”, or “number+period”). Make sure you choose unique strings, that are not found elsewhere in the book. This is also where I set up the footnotes, if they're at the bottom of each page and not at the end of the book or of the chapter. For footnotes see the specific section below. AFR is not particularly good at managing footnotes on its own. Once you've checked all the pages the worst is over, and you can save the document. For reasons I haven't really understood, I think I've found it's better to save the document as HTML, and then to open the HTML file with Open Office and save it as ODT. Don't delete the Finereader document. It will be very useful as reference for the next steps. Only get rid of it once the book is done. You can also save the file directly as epub, and skip step number 3. In that case you obviously need to do most of the editing from the epub file. 4. Formatting the ODT Once you have the ODT file, run Pepito Cleaner (which is basically a pre-compiled regex bundle) and check the major and most common imperfections: lines that start with a lowercase letter, lines that end without punctuation, dashes within the words, space before punctuation, and a few more. Then search, still from Pepito, for all the lines that start with XXX (from the third tab in Pepito search for “^XXX”) and turn them into H1 headings; do the same for H2 and lower, if there's any. Then bulk-remove those markers (from Open Office's search and replace tool, checking the “regex” box just in case there's some instances of those strings within the text: search for ^XXX and replace with empty field). Sometimes AFR omits chunks of text, even if it has recognized them. This usually shows up while running Pepito. Be sure to always pay attention to what you're doing, and to check that it all makes sense. Reading parts of the text you're working on can help you detect errors that otherwise would go unnoticed. Also remove the cover from the ODT file (it works better if you only add it while creating the epub file), and make sure all image files are hosted within the document and are not linked (from Open Office: edit → links → remove links). The ODT is also the stage where footnotes are inserted, if in the printed book they are listed at the end of each page. See specific section. At this point run Writer2Epub. The interface has very few options and they are rather self-explanatory. I always choose to have a table of contents automatically created, and to split the files at H1 headings (splitting the file results in interrupting the flow of the text in the final epub file). Select the cover by browsing through your files (if you had saved the file as HTML it should be in the filename_files folder), and be sure to fill in the metadata. The rest is up to you. The automatically-created table of contents might not be exactly the same as the one in the printed book. You can edit that later on to make it match the original. 5. Formatting the EPUB Now you have your epub: give it its final touches. First of all, to make things a bit simpler, open it with the Calibre editor and click on tools → remove unused CSS rules. Sigil has a similar tool, but I believe Calibre's is more thorough. If you saved the epub directly from AFR, there is a bit more editing to be done at this stage. Saving the default searches and the most commonly used CSS styles will spare you a lot of time and many mistakes. Search for the special strings that you had inserted from Finereader: all the paragraphs that start with “+++” (search: “<p>+++” and “<p><em>+++” and replace with “<p class="margin-top">” and “<p class="margin-top"><em>”); search for all the text within the CIT/TIC markers and place it within a specifically-classed div (select “regex” from the search tool, search for “<p>CIT</p>(.?)<p>TIC</p>” and replace it with “<div class="cit">\1</div>”; there could be more, but these are the most common ones. (Note that in the latter case the CIT/TIC markers must not be in italics, because in that case the regex would miss it). You can save these searches so for the next books you don't need to type them in manually. Of course then you need to style these classes from the epub's CSS file. I just give some margin-top to the former and some margin all around for the latter, maybe reducing the font-size a bit too. This is up to you anyway, as is the case with all the styling you can use, adding fonts (very easy from the Calibre editor), and so on. More default searches that I find useful: replace “ -(\w)” with “ - \1”, and “,</em>” with “</em>,”. The Calibre editor also makes it very easy to split the epub's XHTML files, which usually comes in handy for the first and the last pages of the book (most typically to have a separate page for the book's flap and/or back cover, for its description, the copyright stuff and so on). For those books that have an analytical index, Sigil has a very useful tool that automatically creates one, based on a list you provide (tools → index → index editor) . The problem is that populating that list is usually a very long copy/pasting chore, because most of the time the list is very long. This is where the auto-click software comes in handy. Launch it, record the actions while you copy/paste one item, and then click your way through the rest of the index. Once the list is done click on “create index”, and hey!, the analytical index is served. Getting to know exactly how this tool works might take some fiddling around, but it's very easy. Hover over the column titles in the index editor for a quick explanation. Two tips: 1) The index is case-sensitive, so if you want to index words that are not proper names add (?i) before the “text to include” field; 2) The index matches all the strings that contain that string, so if you want “White” to match only “White” and not “SWhite” or “Whites”, use “\WWhite\W”. At this stage you can also insert some internal links (for references as “see above”, “see page X”, “see chapter Y” and so on). This is easier to do from Sigil, which has a quick option to insert ids and links. Place an id in the position you want to link to, and a link where you want the user to be able to click. Once this is done comes another thankless and important part, the spellcheck. Both Sigil and Calibre have it, but I like the latter a bit more. Load the spellcheck and manually run through all the words it doesn't recognize. They can be in the thousands, and most of them are false positives. Scroll the list one word at a time. Then do it again, and again until you don't find one single word that shouldn't be there. And finally the last step is the debugger. Both Sigil and Calibre have one, but Calibre's is much better and more thorough. See what problems it finds and fix them one at a time. Ideally, before publishing the ebook, you should also read it: from my experience it is virtually impossible to obtain a completely error-free ebook, no matter how careful you are. And that's it, the ebook is ready now. What to do with it now is up to you. For English-language books one great website where you can share it is mobilism, but creating a torrent, and/or using Soulseek, is also a viable option. 6. A note on footnotes* Non-fiction books often feature footnotes. Here's how I deal with them. 1) If the notes are at the bottom of each page. In this case the process starts while correcting the Finereader document. Cut/paste each note from the bottom of the page to the position of its reference within the text, wrapping it within a specific string that you're sure is not used elsewhere in the book. So instead of having the normal flow of the text with some numbers in apex to signal the presence of a note, and at the end of each page the single notes, you get something like “text text###footnote here### text continuing”. This copy-pasting can be made a bit faster with the auto-click software: cut the note, place the cursor where you're going to paste it, launch PTFB, start recording a screen macro, paste the note within the marker-string, stop the recording. Then follow the steps as I said above, until you get the clean and ready ODT file. At this point launch Open Office's search tool, select “more options” and check “regular expression”, and search for “###(.?)###. This will select the text contained within those markers. (Note that this doesn't search through paragraphs: if your note spans more than one paragraph, what you can do is making it one single paragraph, marking the “new line” with a specific string, and then replacing that string, from the epub, with “</p><p>”). Cut the selection, click on insert → footnote, paste it, and search again. This is where PTFB really becomes useful, and saves you a lot of time. Record a macro of these last operations, and then click your way through the book. Don't do it blindly though, and check you're always actually doing it right. When you're done, use the search and replace tool to remove all instances of the marker-string. Now the ODT has the footnotes in their place, and Writer2Epub will automatically render them when creating the epub. You can then style them with CSS. 2) If the footnotes are at the end of each chapter or of the book If they are listed at the end of each chapter you just need some regex wisdom and some search and replace in the epub file. Usually they will be marked by a number in apex (with <sup> </sup> tags) within the text, and by the same number, in apex or not, before each note. You just need to interlink them, and these are the regexs I use: Search <p><sup>([0-9]{1,})</sup>(.?)</p> Replace <p class="footnote"><a href="#t-\1" id="fn-\1"><sup class="fn">\1</sup></a>\2<a href="#t-\1">←</a></p> and search <sup>([0-9]{1,})</sup> replace <a href="#fn-\1" id="t-\1"><sup>\1</sup></a> The former links the notes to their references within the text, and the latter links the references to the notes. Before you run the search and replace though, I advise you to count all the instances of the string (Sigil has an option for that), possibly for one chapter at a time to make it easier, and check if the numbers match. Very often there's missing numbers, bad-formatted paragraphs, and so on. Find out where the errors are, fix them, and when everything is set go for it. These regexs might need some minor tweaking depending on the book, but that's the gist of it. As I said in the introduction, for any doubts check and/or ask on mobileread, or maybe just google “regex cheatsheet”. If the notes are listed at the end of the book, probably the easiest way is manually cut/pasting them at the end of each chapter, from the epub file, and then doing what I just described above. Another option, for books with many footnotes, is running AFR twice, once for the text, without the notes, and another time for the notes, without the text. This way you end up with two separate epub files, which then you have to merge and interlink, more or less as said above in case #2. Sigil has a plugin to automatize this task, but doing it manually can be useful for one more check. Last edited by DiapDealer; 12-12-2019 at 09:13 AM.

12-12-2019, 10:46 AM	#8
DiapDealer Grand Sorcerer Posts: 27,546 Karma: 193191846 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD	Lotta FUD around here. I know of no credible theory that people can't legally scan copies of physical books they own for their own personal use. So long as they are not distributing them in any way, they have nothing to fear. And this thread is about the personal use of scanned copies of personally owned physical books. So any activities by any big bad scary corporate overlords is irrelevant to the discussion. Last edited by DiapDealer; 12-12-2019 at 10:52 AM.

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12-10-2019, 02:02 PM	#2
Quoth the rook, bossing Never. Posts: 11,092 Karma: 85874891 Join Date: Jun 2017 Location: Ireland Device: All 4 Kinds: epub eink, Kindle, android eink, NxtPaper11	First make sure the book is out of copyright, now public domain, as otherwise copying more than few pages is copyright violation. A civil offence in most countries, despite what Google thinks. I save & edit in ODT. But you need to save as in .docx for best conversion in Calibre. Writer2Epub is a waste of time compared to using Calibre. It's much poorer at converting styles. Also use LibreOffice, not OpenOffice, it's nearly history. Proofread, annotate, edit, re-export many times before sharing a PD work. And no, cheap scanners ARE slow and poor compared with SCSI and Ethernet professional models. If it's not a rare book and it's PD and your own then cut binding using an industrial guillotine. Then use the sheet feeder. Do a typical page to create a profile with suitable gamma, brightness, contrast. Some books need scanned at 600 DPI.

12-10-2019, 02:37 PM	#3
PeterT Grand Sorcerer Posts: 12,159 Karma: 73448616 Join Date: Nov 2007 Location: Toronto Device: Nexus 7, Clara, Touch, Tolino EPOS	This might be better suited to being added to the MobileRead Wiki

12-12-2019, 09:18 AM	#5
DiapDealer Grand Sorcerer Posts: 27,546 Karma: 193191846 Join Date: Jan 2010 Device: Nexus 7, Kindle Fire HD	Moderator Notice Two comments that could be construed as encouraging users to download cracked versions of copyrighted software have been removed. Besides being against MR rules to encourage such things, the comments were completely unnecessary/unrelated to your otherwise very helpful instructions. In the future, please refrain from suggesting people try to obtain cracked copies of copyrighted software for any reason.

12-12-2019, 03:42 PM	#11
binaryhermit Grand Sorcerer Posts: 5,696 Karma: 20469902 Join Date: Oct 2014 Location: Lockport, IL Device: Kindle PW4, Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition	good luck enforcing that (even in the unlikely event it's a valid legal theory)

12-13-2019, 01:59 AM	#12
1v4n0 Groupie Posts: 171 Karma: 40000 Join Date: Oct 2013 Device: kindle	Could we stay on topic, please?

12-13-2019, 05:17 AM	#13
pdurrant The Grand Mouse 高貴的老鼠 Posts: 71,496 Karma: 306214458 Join Date: Jul 2007 Location: Norfolk, England Device: Kindle Voyage	You might like to add your guide to the MobileRead Wiki.

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