Can I make my own E-book?

[Kumabjorn]

Nope, not writing it from scratch.

I have a very complicated manual, it is cross-referenced to no end. It is extremely structured, hence very terse in its prose.

A typical sentence will read something like; "This pertains to 1-L-0-B, 2-A-D-1 and components 7-E-3 as well as 7-E-4.
Then off course you have to look up all those references in order to figure out what the whole thing is all about.

So, having purchased a Kindle 2i it just struck me that this particular book would be sooo much easier to handle as E-book. Hence, I'm thinking of scanning it and make it into a MOBI file. Is there some software out there that lets me create all the cross-referencing with a fair amount of ease? (I've done it in Word and it is a tedious process).

Would a project like this violate copyrights? (I'm not going to sell copies of i content is way too esoteric) Any help and advice you can offer would be most welcome.

[GeoffC]

Originally Posted by Kumabjorn

Nope, not writing it from scratch.

I have a very complicated manual, it is cross-referenced to no end. It is extremely structured, hence very terse in its prose.

A typical sentence will read something like; "This pertains to 1-L-0-B, 2-A-D-1 and components 7-E-3 as well as 7-E-4.
Then off course you have to look up all those references in order to figure out what the whole thing is all about.

So, having purchased a Kindle 2i it just struck me that this particular book would be sooo much easier to handle as E-book. Hence, I'm thinking of scanning it and make it into a MOBI file. Is there some software out there that lets me create all the cross-referencing with a fair amount of ease? (I've done it in Word and it is a tedious process).

Would a project like this violate copyrights? (I'm not going to sell copies of i content is way too esoteric) Any help and advice you can offer would be most welcome.

I suspect you are going to have to do this the long way, I doubt there is any software that can take a scanned page, use OCR, and then collate references (though I may be wrong).

You have a mammoth task ahead of you. You bought the book ? if so, there is some argument that the copyright allows you to media-shift for your purposes only, in a similar fashion that allows a CD to be ripped to mp3 - but it depends on your country's copyright laws.

[Kumabjorn]

As for the copyright, I'm not really that worried. Who will really know? And as you say it does seem to be within the parameter of fair use. After posting, I began to realize that it is akin to when I made cassette tapes in my youth to play on a Walkman (does anyone under 40 even know what that is?).

As for the production process, it would be really nice if there was a software that I could tell where it should "anchor" the cross reference. A section entitled 2-A-3-1 for example would be printed in a 16 pt font, whereas the regular references - also entitled 2-A-3-1 are in 11 pt. So all I really need is probably some sort of advanced macro that will do a search & insert (not replace), hence inserting code that points to that specific location in the document.

[nomesque]

You COULD probably do that in VBA. You'd need a loop which goes through the text searching for a 16pt-formatted character, highlights the whole word/paragraph, inserts a bookmark of the same name (replacing spaces with underscores, perhaps), then searches for text strings matching that bookmarked string, and adds a bookmark reference to each one of them.

Here's a start (because once I started talking about it, I had to see if it would actually work):

Sub SearchNBookmark()

Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = True
.Font.Size = 16
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
Selection.Copy
With ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
.Add Range:=Selection.Range, Name:="Blah_blah_blah"
.DefaultSorting = wdSortByName
.ShowHidden = False
End With
With ActiveDocument.Bookmarks
.DefaultSorting = wdSortByLocation
.ShowHidden = False
End With
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = "Blah blah blah"
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindContinue
.Format = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
Selection.InsertCrossReference ReferenceType:="Bookmark", ReferenceKind:= _
wdContentText, ReferenceItem:="Blah_blah_blah", InsertAsHyperlink:=True, _
IncludePosition:=False, SeparateNumbers:=False, SeparatorString:=" "
End Sub

[GeoffC]

advanced macros should do it, as nomesque has suggested. a lotta work, though

enjoy ....

[Fith]

You could even use html. Learning something new to ease/automate the amount of cross referencing you will be doing is a good thing. However, considering the mammoth task of proof reading you face, you may want to consider doing them manually while you work your way through it all. It may depend on if its a one off or you have other books to convert too.