Query on Software (for Publishing Book)

Hello friends,

i'm a student learning ancient languages and today in class our teacher mentioned his wish to print and publish a Volume compiled of a number of scholarly articles from varied sources. The problem is that the different articles are of different types in size. Some are from books printed on large pages while others from books where the page dimensions keep changing. He sees no hope as after consultation with some computer literate people he concluded that there is no solution to getting one uniform size for the book.

My understanding in software and computers is very basic and so I seek help from more advanced users like you. Is there a software created or a way (step-wise procedure using different software) by which the different sized pages may all be re-sized to a standard type?

I hope the problem has been explained in a clear manner.
Thanks for helping.

 

I do a fair amount of document processing, it can be a sticky wicket. DavidGP, your method is sometimes all that can be done..

buffer1984:
To automate DavidGP's method a bit, I would create empty docs set to the desired settings and use them as templates.

If the documents are PDF, they can be saved as text if you're using good software such as Acrobat. If they need OCR first, the time and effort expended goes up considerably.

A good tool to have is Calibre for document conversion. It is cross platform, visit the MG link to their site for the Mac, Linux and Win 64 versions.

I know many tricks and tweaks for this kind of work and would be happy to help. A little info would be helpful to me:

• What files types are you encountering?
• What file type do you wish as output?
• Do you have a budget for some software?
• What software tools do you currently have and use?
• Do you have a flatbed scanner?
• Computer OS this work will done on?

I might have more questions, but these will do for now. Let me know, I'm on station...

 

Scribus http://www.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus would be the best choice for something to do this project with.

 

About Scribus:

It is an excellent Desktop Publishing app. It is second only to Quark for layout work, and second only to Acrobat for PDF work. Being free, this is often more than enough for most applications.

Keep in mind, Scribus is for creating new PDFs from other PDFs/text sources. It is for making brochures and the like. Being as good as it is means a bit of a learning curve as there is with all higher end document software. The GUI is a bit complex...

If converting those texts to PDF is the direction you wish to go, Scribus is a good solution. Keep in mind that is has no Optical Character Recognition, OCR.

A good analysis of its pros and cons, what pros would use it for, what they wouldn't use it for, is at:

https://pointnewpar.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/scribus-open-source-alternative-to-quark-and-indesign/