How to edit pdf book?

[autoretscriptor]

Hi everyone,

I wrote a 700 page book on computer software 20 years ago. A new publisher is now interested in publishing an updated 2nd edition.

How would I go about editing / updating this big book?

What I have --
1. my original 20 year old Word files -- drastically hacked up by the original publisher so badly they appear almost unintelligible
2. the PDF version of the printed work

To edit the PDF book, I think I'd have to separate it into individual chapters.

I tried Adobe's PDF -> Word converter tool, but it was 98% accurate (unacceptable for a computer book). It messed up when fonts changed within paragraphs, and also introduced random dashes in the middle of some words, and sometimes chopped off code in code boxes.

I guess I could try Adobe's direct PDF editor, but this still leaves questions like --

1. How would I repaginate everything?
2. How do you ensure you have the page gutters correctly alternating back and forth?
3. How do you rebuild the index?

Is Adobe's online editor as capable as their product you install on your PC?

Any advice anyone could give I would appreciate. Thank you.

 

[ColGray]

Can you be more specific about the word file and how it was hacked up by the original publisher?

(All this coming from someone who spent ~20 years in legal discovery/disclosure and seeing every file format imaginable--then having to try and make them readable/presentable/producible to a court)

I assume it's a 97-03 .DOC format and I'll infer from your other comments it uses styles for things like sections, section headers and quotes.

From an editing standpoint, the Word file is likely going to be cleaner if you can perform a solid conversion between file formats and the issues are layout/publishing related and not content related.

PDF conversion tools, even Adobe's, can really struggle to generate a usable format for editing because the intended use is the opposite: PDF's exist to lock down and make files hard to edit. Even if you take a PDF and convert it to DOCX, the spaces, returns and formatting are likely to be manual, not stylistic.

As a specific example, there are three main ways which Word understands a tabbed indent to open a paragraph:

1. A style where the opening line of a new paragraph is indented .5", as defined by the Word Style
2. A tab, coded into the text (if you turn on Show/Hide in Word, you'll see the little arrow)
3. Spaces that combine to equal the .5" indent.

The best is the first-- you can edit and change throughout the document with ease. The second best is manual but consistent and easy to edit within each paragraph. The last is the worst, and the most common outcome for a converted PDF. Compounding being the worst, the conversion will be inconsistent; paragraphs will have between 4 and 8 spaces based on how they're converted by the system.

TLDR: Time spent with the Word file is likely to be more productive because Word is built to write and edit.

 

[tinkerdan]

Unless the pdf is in some sort of protected or secured mode...which is what most adobe generated files are.
You should be able to directly import it into the current Microsoft word.
It might be lacking some formatting but it should be all intact and you can reformat at your discretion..

I have-in the past done a select copy and paste from pdf to word.
This can be unpredictable sometimes and I usually only do it for short files.

If a file is old enough I have version 5 of adobe writer and can usually export or save the file out in a usable format.

As to the word file--where is your original?
I always keep backups.
And backups of backups.

My editors were always exacting in that they would use the embedded tools in word to sort out their suggestions to corrections.
Then I make the desired changes when and what I approve.
Their material is always something that can be shut off or deleted while no changes are made to the document itself.

 

[Brian G Turner]

How would I go about editing / updating this big book?

1. How would I repaginate everything?
2. How do you ensure you have the page gutters correctly alternating back and forth?
3. How do you rebuild the index?

Isn't this all what the publisher should be doing?

Otherwise surely you may as well just self-publish it yourself?

 

[autoretscriptor]

Thank you, everyone, for your replies.

(1) Concerning the PDFs -- I tried Adobe's PDF to Word conversion tool. Exactly as you state @ColGray, it is about 98% accurate. For many situations, like a textual novel, that would work great.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work for this technical computer book. Among other problems, the conversion messes up when fonts change within paragraphs (common in a computer book because the publisher used a different font for variable names), it sometimes cuts off computer code in a text box or wraps it around (that's bad!), etc.

Bottom line -- the PDF -> Word conversion would cost lots of manual clean-up on my part, and would challenge the technical accuracy of the book. A no-go.

(2) Concerning the original Word files -- yes, they're Word pre-2003, .DOC files. The publisher inserted tons of changes and comments into the text, which are all still there. I wish they had done as you state, @tinkerdan, and made comments that could easily be shut off or deleted. But it doesn't look like they followed what surely must be industry-standard practice today. Maybe if I work with it a while I can figure out a clever way to delete their stuff. Thank you for the idea.

Also, I'm a little worried about the technical accuracy of the original Word files. What I proofed before publication was the PDFs sent by the publisher, and that's what I ran final tests of my computer programs against.

Bottom line -- using the original Word files may be possible but very time consuming.

(3) As @Brian suggests, have the publisher handle these problems. Provide them with a mixture of existing PDFs for chapters I don't want to change, and new Word files for chapters I rewrite.

That's what I'll try first. The publisher in this case is not a professional publishing outfit, but hopefully they can handle this.

Thank you all for your advice.

 

[JunkMonkey]

I've not tried it but I noticed the last update of Firefox announced it now allowed you to directly edit PDFs.

 

[hitmouse]

Agree. Either edit the pdf directly, write new material in word ( which will need careful proofing after conversion) and ask the publisher for help.

 

[Orcadian]

@autoretscriptor I use PDF2Go for a lot of stuff: https://www dot pdf2go dot com/. A lot of their stuff is free and I don't know what sort of a job that would do on a very technical document. But they also do contract work: https://www dot pdf2go dot com/pricing