Help with cookbook from scans

[silsurf@me.com]

I am creating a cookbook from scanned old recipes and having some difficulty. I scanned the pages into three separate pdf's. I have added table of contents entries for each page as the recipe name.

this is what I am trying to do.

1. Combine the three pdfs into one pdf maintaining the TOC entries

2. Sort the TOC alphabetically

3. Create a table of contents page with pages numbers

4. Add some artwork, mostly just a front and back cover

5. Send it to a print service to create a book

It seems this should all be pretty straight forward, but I was having issues with the pdf software I was using and decided to subscribe to Acrobat Pro as I assume Adobe is going to make my life easier??

All guidance will be gratly appreciated. Ihad hope to have this ready for Christmas, but no longer intending to meet that deadline

Thanks

[try67]

What kind of TOC did you create, and how did you create it?

Generally speaking, Acrobat is not suited for creating a TOC from scratch, although it can be done.

For example, if your file contains bookmarks then a script can be used to converted them to a TOC, even with clickable links. I've developed a (paid-for) tool that does just that:

https://www.try67.com/tool/acrobat-create-a-table-of-contents-toc-in-a-pdf-file-from-bookmarks

But doing it by hand will require quite a bit of work, especially if you have a lot of items to add.

[silsurf@me.com]

They are bookmarks, I used PDFPen Pro for MAC and they called them TOC's, but they show up when I view bookmarks in Acrobat

[try67]

In that case you can just drag and drop them to be in the desired order, but be aware they won't be a part of the printed copy.

[gary_sc]

Adding to what Try67 just wrote, I concur. 

However, as a published author, I'm assuming that all of these recipes are from books that are long past their copyright dates. If these are from sources where the current copyright is still in service, you are asking to be sued right, left, and center by all offending authors — even if you give these away for free. That last bit is important because if you do anything that impedes the sale of future copies of these sources, you are in violation. Getting recipes for free means you do not have to buy the book they came from, so you are impeding the sale of the book and you are in violation.

But, on the assumption that these are all from books that are long out of copyright, your desire to merge the three individual PDFs into one is easy to do in Acrobat. Everything else you want to do should not be done in Acrobat. 

Overall, the basic issue/problem is that Acrobat is NOT a page layout application. You state that you want to add artwork. That can be a major pain in Acrobat, but it's relatively easy to do in a Page Layout application like InDesign. Plus, you can create the TOC there.  

By the way, TOCs should NOT be ordered alphabetically but by order of appearance. The contents (at the end of a book) SHOULD be alphabetical (along with sublevels, e.g., Fish, then subentries: Cod, then Salmon, not Salmon, and then Cod).

Regarding scanning your content, you may wish to look through a blog I wrote a number of years ago for Adobe on how to get clean, searchable scans. 

https://community.adobe.com/t5/adobe-community-professionals/scanning-clean-searchable-pdfs/m-p/4785...

If you have no experience with InDesign, I might suggest you plan on giving this to your friends for next Christmas. It sounds like you think this can all be automated while you stand back. That's not how this will work. This will take some time and love, and when you finish, all of those you give this to will cherish it. But it will not be this Christmas. Even if you had it ready to go now, no book printing service could have it ready by Christmas. That's a sad but real truth. 

Oh, one last comment: any professional printing company that looks at the content and realizes that the recipes are still under copyright will (or should) refuse to print this, making all your work for naught.

Good luck!

[silsurf@me.com]

These are hand written recipes form my grandomother and the book is only for her daughter as a keep sake

[silsurf@me.com]

The scans are already done. This is not "book" as much as it is just a way of preserving my grandmothers recipes. There are no copywirght issues, but I appreciate your concern.

I used to used iNDesign, PageMaker before that, made a few books from scratch and if I have to I will go back to a layout design program. But this is a very simple project, I make photo books in Lightroom so that would be another option as they are all scanned pages at this point. Really I was hoping for some help with Acrobats functionality given my current situation. Thakns again for tkaing the time to reply

[try67]

The main issue is the TOC. If you drop that, you can do it in a matter of minutes.

If you have to have it, I would recommend even doing it in Word, and then converting it to PDF and inserting it into the book.

It will save you a lot of headaches and unnecessary work, trying to do it in Acrobat directly.

[silsurf@me.com]

Thanks, can you clarify what "if you drop that you can do it in a matter of minutes" refers to?

From what I am reading and experiencing I am making more work for myself than necessary. Is there a way to export the pages maintaining the TOC or Bookmarks entries for each page? Then I would just use a layout prgram for the rest. 

Thanks

[try67]

I meant the TOC. Without it what you're asking for is very easy to do.

[silsurf@me.com]

Do you know if I can export my pages keeping the Bookmark in the title of the xported page? That way it would be easy for me to finish the project in another application?

So if I have all the pages with a "bookmark" entry I can sort alphabetically, I can take care of the TOC in another way, but hand moving thumbnails for. 150 pages sdeems a bit unessessary in this age.

Thanks so much for the feedback