I want to bring out a paperback version of The Catholic Orangemen of Togo. It remains available free online in various places. Unfortunately I cannot find an electronic version of the original text, it being somewhere on what has become a large collection of dead laptops.
I therefore subscribed to Adobe Professional and tried to convert one of the online PDFs, but the result was gobbledegook. Can anyone help me with this, and provide a version I can work on in Word or any other programme which works with Open Office Writer? I need to make a couple of corrections and reformat.
If anybody is really clever and can change the text on the cover artwork to a flame orange that can be read, that would be great too.
The contact button at the top of the page works to get me.
Thanks x
Dead laptop not to much problem if you still have them can take out hard drives and connect them to working laptop/pc even if hard drive seems dead can still possibly extract data.
I’m using DOCX. I found that rebuilding the index in Word (I’ve only done A-B so far!) matches the one in the published PDF very well. Craig was certainly using OpenOffice for other projects; I guess Word and Writer must use the same defaults.
I agree it’s normally best to leave indexing till near the final proof. Minor edits or pagination changes are no problem, but major edits can disrupt page-spanning bookmarks and new sections of text require additional marking.
Maybe there’s a way to adapt the bookmarks in Markdown, so they can be picked up by an indexer?
Guess it could be done lighter. More sympathetic to the original. http://s338.photobucket.com/user/ishim42/media/01togo-front-cover4_zps57e3309d.jpg.html
http://s338.photobucket.com/user/ishim42/media/01togo-front-cover5_zps606606be.jpg.html
Republic of Scotland 7.35pm
Really informative post and site – thank you.
I’m got some exploring to do!
@SamX: I think it is not worth the effort to try and re-build the index exactly as it used to be in the old version. Creating + building a completely new index from scratch is waayyyy faster. You go through the pages from the start (use automatic search) to find all words with first capital letter. This gives you all the countries and names and acronyms. That means you got 85% already. Then compare to some lower-case words from the old index and add these too…
With OpenOffice/LibreOffice it is really easy+fast+efficient. Indexing any term normally is just 1 double click plus 1 single click. You can tell it to auto-create index entries for all the other occurrences of any word you indexed for the first time. I think I could do it for the 200 pages in less than 2 hours of work.
I wrote:
Hmm… I think I take that back. While it IS possible to create a first, one-level index within 2 hours, this is not yet a good index. A good one should IMHO contain not only s.th. like
Craig Murry 33, 44, 55
Ghana 66, 77
(which is rather easy and fast to add) — but also
Ghana
Craig Murry (CM)
Murray, Craig (CM)
Murray
which is much more work to do. I’ve never done such work, that’s why I underestimated it.
PS. It is Jamie pdfkungfoo.
fyi adobe pro has an export function. file->export and then save in doc (word) format.
you can subsequently save it as docx from word itself if you care to.
I can recommend using Caligra Word (used to be KDE writer) to convert (and edit) PDF to OpenOffice/LibreOffice.
It’s pretty easy to use and not bad at the job.
I have always found zamzar to be very efficient though there might be a size limit on the file using the free edition.