| Joined: | Mon Apr 2nd, 2012 |
| Location: | South Lakeland, UK |
| Posts: | 4066 |
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My approach was to break the text down into about 7 manageable batches The only problem if you are't VERY careful is you can get inconsistencies between the various chunks of text, That can be resolved by putting them all together and applying a basic style, then applying the styles you want for the entire document.
In this case my problem was I had done the ancillary text first, then shelved it, 12 years ago! I should have created a backup in plain ASCII text so I wasn't dependent on the MS Word format. Kind of like going back to RAW!
My biggest job was spell checking, as mentioned in my first post the manuscript if full of botanic plant names and foreign personal and place names. Spelling is not one of my strong points and then throw in the interesting factor that some of the name spelling is disputed between various 'expert' bodies. I gathered dictionaries (computerised word lists) from around the world, Kew, the Royal Botanic Society and other sources and played them off against one another by spell checking each one against my own custom list of about 90,000 words I had created manually. It was very interesting but also rather time consuming... I checked every word in my custom dictionary, letter by letter. Still the odd error slipped through. Amazingly, I found that by scanning my eye down an alphabetic sorted list of words I could spot errors from the shape of the words.
I still have to decide where to publish it. Popular convention suggests Kindle, possibly Apple iBooks but I am not sure I want to get involved with the American IRS, and the UK Customs and Revenue department, one other possibility is to 'sell' a PDF version from my own website. That is still down the road as it were, I rather resent giving Kindle (or Apple) 30% then the IRS 30%, The UK Customs and revenue wanting their cut, I may as well not bother. Have had major capital expenditure in software, computers and photographic equipment over the last 30 years, I can only offset purchases made in the last 2 years against any profits so that side of things could be even more complex than creating the publication.
There is also of course the traditional publishing route but for such a specialised work I think that may not be viable, especially to illustrate it.
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Robert.