InDesign v. Pagemaker

I've done exactly that workflow on a number of occasions. But if that's the workflow you want to pursue I have a few suggestions for you:

• Break the files down to chapters, and assemble them using InDesign's built-in Book functions. They let you stitch a number of smaller files together to combine and process as an entire work while working out the bugs of doing the job into smaller, bite-sized pieces. You can learn more about InDesign's Book functions through this link. Be sure to read into the follow-on links in that help file. This essentially walks you through assembling your book step by step.
• Rather than just run the book through your scanner/OCR setup and suffer the consequences, take a little time fine-tuning your OCR process to get the best results on one chapter, then apply those lessons learned to speed the process for the rest of your book. Another writer helping others here has come up with an excellent primer for managing the scanning and OCR parts of your process and getting the best results from your efforts. Reading what he has to say through this link and using one chapter to adjust/refine your scans, then applying lessons learned for best results will pay dividends throughout the rest of your job.
• Like others here, I strongly recommend that you run your OCR output through a word processing program like MSWord to fix your copy, then place the corrected copy into InDesign. You can edit copy within InDesign, but it's unnecessarily painful and inefficient. Fixing all your OCR output in word processing, and then placing the corrected copy into your InDesign layouts will be much faster and efficient than doing it within InDesign, watching your page count go up or down like every third time you edit the text and having to adjust, then readjust your layouts repeatedly throughout the process.
• If you're building indexing (check out this link and follow-on links), save yourself as much aggravation as you can by waiting to build the index as one of the last things you do. For table of contents (this link and follow-on links) and other global changes/refinements like fine-tuning page breaks and eliminating widows/orphans from text, it's probably best to leave those off until the very last pass as well.

InDesign is a great book production program. Investing a little time in how to make it fully work for you will pay handsome dividends.

Hope this helps,

Randy

Yes, InDesign is a professional book publishing program and fully replaces PageMaker with far more advanced features for layout, typography, and digital publishing. It includes all of PageMaker's core capabilities and much more. For reprints, scanning the book, using OCR in Acrobat, and then editing in InDesign is a common and effective workflow—especially when original files are unavailable. Just be sure to proofread carefully, as OCR can introduce errors.

What exactly is it that you need? Are you starting from scratch? If so, InDesign is the industry standard. Do you have a PM file? It can only be opened in InDesign version CS6 (released in 2012) or earlier and the results of that conversion will leave you with a file that needs work.

So, please back up and give us some details on this.

Hi Ira,

Yes, InDesign is the forward evolution of PageMaker. 

You want to reprint, so...

Do you have the original PM files? They can be opened by those of us who have preserved an old install of PM6/7. This would get you into a new InDesign file for further editing.

Do you only have the PDF of the book? That can be opened in Acrobat Pro and the full text can be exported to a Word docx, which can be File > Place back into a new InDesign document.

Are there pixel-based pictures in the old book? If a PDF document exists, you can export them out all at once to an image assets folder and then File > Place the images into a new InDesign document.

If neither PM nor PDF exist anymore, then, yes, you can scan the pages and let Acrobat Pro optical-character-recognition the text and also export the text out to a Word docx again (for rebuilding into a new InDesign file). Yes, that will be time-consuming. One last thought: make sure those pages are scanned perfectly flat. Acrobat does a bad job of OCR-ing scanned pages that show curvature in 3 dimensions.

Just adding a few things to @Brad @ Roaring Mouse's helpful reply:

InDesign was released in 2000 to replace PageMaker (which could no longer be updated and modernized), and pulled in features from PageMaker, Quark and FrameMaker.

It originally included the same document- and book-level controls that you know from PageMaker but has been adding features over the past 25 years to make our layout work faster and easier than it ever was in PageMaker. I have specialized in long document layout since the late 80s, and I would not want to return to the more limited feature set in PageMaker. That said, with additional features comes a learning curve—you can OCR the PDF in Acrobat, export out the copy, clean up the file and edit it in Word and then use File > Place (just like PageMaker!) to add the content into an InDesign document—but then you will need to set aside some time to come up to speed on InDesign.

In particular, be sure to read up on parent pages (Pm's master pages), including linked parent pages (not in Pm), primary frames (not in Pm), paragraph and character styles (like Pm). The book window is similar to Pm's book window, as is file management within the book window. InDesign also supports running header/footer variables to pull content (like titles) into the running heads automatically (not in Pm), and automatic cross-references to help the reader navigate (not in Pm). 

There are a number of old Pm users helping out on this forum. If you get stuck, just ask us.

~Barb

Yes, InDesign is a page layout program and is the direct replacement for PageMaker. It's considerably more capable and sophisticated, and is still the most widely used in the industry for that purpose.

When you talk about a reprint, was the book something done in PageMaker previously? For many years, InDesign had the ability to convert PageMaker files, but that was removed after CS6. So you would need to find someone that still has a version that old (I do, as do a few of us here). It's also still possible to install a trial version of CS6 if you can find an installer for it, as Adobe no longer provides these, and this would give you the trial period (usually 30 days) to convert any files you might have. This also depends on having a computer system that can run it.

However, if you are talking about all you have is a printed sample, OCR-ing is definitely a way to go, then using that copy to layout a new document and design it as you desire.