As many of you know, I’ve been working for a long time on publishing my father’s novel, Troika. Unfortunately, it’s being released posthumously, though he did get to see a near-final printed copy. The text is now ready to roll, pending one fix that’s had me stuck for a few months.
We’ve decided to put the book out via lulu.com. This means that the book won’t have an ISBN number, but that’s OK, since we expect that it wouldn’t have helped get it out, and would have created more obstacles than it was worth.
However, on the copyright page of the book, we had put a line with a dummy ::wikipedia(”ISBN”,”ISBN”):: number, which was going to be replaced with the real one, once we got it. That line has to go now, either removed from the PDF file or printed in clear type so it’s invisible.
The problem is that the file exists only in the near-final PDF format, and I don’t have the tools needed to tweak it. As far as I can tell, the only tool that can handle it is Adobe Acrobat, which is quite expensive. One would think that open source tools would be available, since the PDF format is open, and tools exist to read PDF files. Tools such as koffice can import and export PDF, but not as perfectly as something that would edit it directly.
So… tossing this out to the group mind: does anyone know a way to do this? Or would any of you who might have the right tools be willing to get the file from me and do this fix?
Thanks for any enlightenment…
Ron Fischer | September 8, 2006 - ט"ו אלול תשס"ו at 2:36 pm | Permalink
If you can find the string of ASCII characters in the file you should be able to replace them with an equivalent number of space characters. However see this article which gives you some idea of the different ways the text might be “encoded” in there. Once you know the encoding a sed script or any text editor capable of treating the file as “binary characters” regardless of the format implied by the extension should do the trick. Here’s a utility that might work.
Xslf | September 17, 2006 - כ"ד אלול תשס"ו at 10:54 am | Permalink
I own the full copy of Adobe Acrobat Pro, so feel free to drop me a line and I’ll what can be done (due to file format limitations, I can’t guarantee what you want can be done properly even with the full Acrobat).
Bill Bowman | November 15, 2006 - כ"ד חשון תשס"ז at 2:39 pm | Permalink
Hey Joe…I published a book at LuLu and I’m pretty happy with the result. I paid the extra $99 (now $149, I believe) and got an ISBN number, which also included distribution to a couple decent distributors (Ingram’s??) and inclusion at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.com. I bought books both from LuLu and Amazon (they use different POD suppliers) and was happy with the quality of both.
Good luck!
Bill.
Joseph Zitt :: My Father’s Novel Published | November 16, 2006 - כ"ה חשון תשס"ז at 3:52 am | Permalink
[...] (Bill Bowman has pointed out in a blog comment today that he has successfully published his book via Lulu, ISBN and all. It looks intriguing, and I hope to read it. But I’m also guessing that it will have a much larger audience that we might expect for Troika.) [...]