Book People Archive

The "Bookmarks" in a well-ordered PDF should be the page numbers

Some time ago I let Bowerbird have a couple of CDs of some of the PDFs  of
the books I had been working on. If he looks at these he will see that they
can be viewed with "Bookmarks" or "Thumbnails", or neither, of course. The
latter two modes don't help much when navigating in a hurry, but the
"Bookmarks" are actually the page numbers. He would find that "Snow Shoes
and Canoes" by W.H.G. Kingston is a good example to illustrate the point I
am about to make, but actually any of the others will illustrate it, though
possibly less well. When I am scanning I assign numbers aaa001, aaa002, etc,
to the text pages before the bodytext. This may or may not include Preface,
Introduction, Foreword, and so forth. The Title Page is usually numbered
aaa001 or aaa002. The next sequence begins with ccc, and are all images, the
pictures in the book, if any, but still with the page number they eventually
have to go to clearly in the name. Then I assign a sequence exactly
corresponding to the bodytext page numbers. For instance in "Snow Shoes"
page 11 is the first page of the bodytext, and that scan was called
snoca011.tif, the next page, page 12 of course, is snoca012.tif, and so on
right to the end, page 394, called snoca394.tif. After the bodytext of this
class of book we usually find the publisher's advertisements, and in this
case these were xxx0001.tif, up to xxx0006.tif.

It has never occurred to me to make my PDFs in such a way that you can't
click on a Bookmark and get the corresponding page, so I do not understand
what all the fuss is about. I do not think that the reverse-numbered Hebrew
pages would be a big problem, but these sorts of problems have a habit of
popping up when you are tired and it's late at night.  You would actually
need to include elements from two number sequences in the tif name, the
first being the sort order and the second the page number. These two numbers
will always add up to the same total for each page.

All this is done for me quite automatically. I never have to think about it.
It just depends on a little bit of crafty software that the scans encounter
while being processed.

The program used to create the PDFs from the several tiff sequences that the
book is composed of is "Image To PDF v2.4.0". This program creates exactly
the PDFs we require for reading the scans of a book, or for researching, and
it doesn't cost a lot. The pages appear in sorted order, increasing, or
decreasing if you like. I think I did a couple of Urdu books in a decreasing
sort.

Alas I have just discovered that even the virtuous Acrobat reader 5.0 gets
its page numbers jumbled up when you ask it to display in Continuous or
Continuous-facing Mode. And that turned out to be the problem with Adobe
Reader 7: just avoid those modes. so I may have been telling everyone that
this version of AR 7 doesn't work, when you can set it so that it does  work.

Nick Hodson, Athelstane, London, England, United Kingdom