Do-It-Yourself: PDF format for e-book production

The PDF (Portable Document Format) file format is an electronic file format developed by Adobe. This file format is common across Windows, Unix, and Apple's Mac OS operating system, and has many advantages over other electronic document formats. It encapsulates text, fonts, formats, colors, and graphic images independent of device and resolution in a single file. The format file can also contain electronic information such as hypertext links, sounds and motion pictures, support for special files, and high integration and security.

The e-book made with PDF has the texture and reading effect of the paper version, which can display the original appearance of the original book “realistically”, and the display size can be adjusted arbitrarily, providing readers with a personalized reading method. This makes reading quite convenient. The authoritative PDF file reading software is Adobe Reader, which is available from Adobe. The current version is 7.0. This article also describes the use of this reading software to make their own electronic books in PDF format.

I. Software Preparation

There are still a lot of special software for making PDF. For example, Adobe's Acrobat 7.0 Professional (Professional Edition) is a powerful tool. The size of this software is 200MB, which is more complicated to use. It is recommended to use another easy-to-use production tool "PDF Gold". ".

Software Name: DocuCom PDF gold 7.83 R1 Chinese version

Software Language: Simplified Chinese

Software Size: 22.4MB

Software Description: This software It integrates both PDF Driver and PDF Plus and can be used to create, assemble, mark up, edit, protect, store and publish PDF documents to meet all your requirements when working with PDF documents.

Second, the production process.

After the software installation is complete, you can start the production program "DocuCom PDF Plus". The main interface is shown in Figure 1. It uses the familiar Word-style editing window. The software provides a variety of ways to create a new PDF file, or batch convert existing documents into a PDF electronic document. The following is an example of creating a new PDF electronic document.

New File

Step 1: Click “File\\Create PDF File\\New File” on the menu bar to create a new blank PDF document. Then click Edit\\Bookmarks\\Show Bookmark Panel to open the bookmark editing panel on the left side of the editing area.

Step 2: Make an electronic document cover

First click on the "Text Box" icon on the shortcut toolbar, then hold down the left mouse button and drag an area in the editing area; You can enter the required text, and finally modify the size, color, font, etc. of the text. as shown in picture 2.

Making an electronic document cover

The pattern of the tree shown in Figure 2 is implemented using the software's clip art function. Click the clip art icon on the shortcut bar to open the clip art manager window shown in Figure 3. Double-click the pattern to insert it into the edit window.

Select Pattern

Tip: If you want to add a custom pattern, click the "Create" link in the lower right corner of the manager, and then open the window shown in Figure 4. Then click the "Browse" option in the upper right corner to find the desired pattern from the hard disk to import; then define the group name and file name to insert into the created PDF document.

Double-click on the pattern to insert it into the editing window

Step 3: Create a document directory. Click Edit\\Page\\New Page on the main menu to open the dialog shown in Figure 5. Keep the default option to insert a new page after the current page (cover page). The production of this step is relatively simple, that is, the text editing of the catalog; if you want to make the page more beautiful, you can also add some images for decoration.

Creating a Document Directory

Tip: Clicking on the "Portrait" option will bring up a drop-down menu that defines the insertion direction of the new page; in addition, the page size, page count, insertion point, You can customize it by clicking the drop-down menu that pops up.

Step 4: Make the body content

Insert a new page as shown in step 4. Then copy the text content into the editing area, and then edit the page; you can add watermark effects to the page, add interactive buttons, add sound attachments, and so on. Here is an example of adding a watermark effect. Other functional readers can slowly experience it. Click the "Show Watermark Page" button on the shortcut bar to open the dialog shown in Figure 6. Once you have selected a style, you can apply it to the editing area.

Making Body Content

If you need to customize the watermark effect, you can click the "Create" option in the lower right corner of the Watermark Manager to open the edit box shown in Figure 7. You can define the watermark content as text or image, as well as custom size, color and other parameters.

Edit Watermark

Step 5: Complete label creation. Right click on each page you made, select the "Add Bookmark" command, and then name the bookmark in the bookmark edit box on the left. Edit the entire PDF electronic document structure in this way. For example, "cover, catalog, and regular article section, etc."; right-clicking on the signature of the book can be used to adjust the color of the text.

After confirming the error, you can finally save the edited PDF file by clicking the “File\\Save” command on the main menu; this completes the entire production process. Finally, I have to mention that the "DocuCom PDF Direct!" tool provided by this software can convert image files, Office files and web files into a PDF electronic document in batches. After launching this tool, the dialog window shown in Figure 8 will appear.
Manager

Click the "Add" button at the top to add all the files to be merged. Other options can be kept as default, then click the "GO" button; wait a moment to complete the merge. The only downside is that the merged PDF document will be watermarked with this software name, as shown in the red line in Figure 9.

Adding all files to be merged

Software Review:

This software has a slightly higher resource usage, but its functionality is powerful. You can completely customize the electronic document, or you can merge the existing images, documents, web pages and other materials into a ready-made PDF document. The more distinctive features are its clip art and watermark function, which can greatly increase the readability of the entire document. In addition to the basic functions described above, this software can also be used to create index directories for electronic documents and to require security verification. In general, although the software is small, the functions it contains are rich and can completely compete with any wonderful PDF e-book.