A 1,419-page scanned book, rebuilt in Word · case

The starting point

A scanned PDF is not a book. It is a photograph of one.

It looks fine and it is useless for work. You cannot fix a typo, move an exercise or change the type size. For a publisher who lives by updating and reissuing courses, that file is dead.

The job was to give the book back in Word and have it be genuinely editable: not a dump of running text, but the book with its structure still standing.

Before and after

The same book, usable

On the left, a stack of yellowed scanned pages; on the right, the same work on clean pages with its tables. — Illustration for this case. These are not pages from the client's book.

The work, in numbers

What came in and what went out

1,419

scanned pages in

637

pages in the delivered book

408

tables rebuilt as tables, not as pictures

69

illustrations, each one back in place

104

words mixing both alphabets, fixed one at a time

5.0

star rating from the client

The gap between 1,419 and 637 is not our cut: the client asked to drop the repeated drills from the original. All 1,419 were read anyway, because deciding what goes means reading what stays.

The problem you cannot see

Two alphabets that look the same

In a book that runs on both the Latin and the Cyrillic alphabet, some letters are drawn identically and are, to a computer, entirely different characters. A single word can hold both and still look perfect.

The damage is silent. That word never turns up in a search, the spellchecker does not know it, and the index files it somewhere else. Nobody notices until the book is out.
104 were fixed, out of 107 found. The last three allowed more than one reading, and a blind fix would have changed the word itself.

Latin aeop

Cyrillic аеор

Eight different letters. Four shapes.

What the client got

A file he can keep working in

Word with a style sheet. Headings are headings and body text is body text, so redesigning the whole book means changing a style, not touching 637 pages.
The tables are tables. They can be edited, sorted and widened. A table pasted in as a picture looks the same on day one and can never be corrected.
Delivered module by module, so he could review as the work went instead of receiving a thousand pages at the end.

What the client said

“A very good professional: the work is high quality, he delivers on time, pays attention to detail, meets the requirements of the job and asks when in doubt, and reports back on it. He is a pleasure to work with, and I will keep doing so whenever the chance comes up.”

Public five-star review on Workana, written in Spanish; the translation is ours. The same client left it for the previous job, a 269-page Italian course.

That was his first commission. This book came next.