Writing an e-book is not as difficult as it may sound - in fact, anyone can do it! Most people write e-books for marketing purposes, for example, to spread the news about their website or product promotion. Of course, e-books are also a great idea for any author who cannot get published the traditional way.

So how do you format an e-book yourself if you are not working with an online publisher that usually handles all the formatting issues for you? Luckily, it’s very easy to prepare a manuscript for e-book distribution. Most people use Microsoft Word and then convert the file to PDF format.

The Majority of e-books are sold in Adobe Acrobat’s PDF file format, however, the designing of your e-book will first be done in Word (some people may have to use Pagemaker or Quark for more complicated designs containing illustrations).

The good news is that you don’t have to own a version of Adobe Acrobat to convert a Word file into a PDF format. At the same time, owning the Adobe Acrobat program will allow you to add neat features to your e-book, such as hotlinked URLs, forms, and pages imported from other programs. This gives an e-book a higher quality appearance. Adobe costs about $200.

The Design

A good e-book has to be well designed and well organized - you don’t want it to come off looking cheap and unprofessional. Fortunately, it’s very easy to use the features available in Word for proper formatting.

Page size. E-book pages are usually between 5x7 and 6x9 (5.5x8.5 is the typical format). Set the custom page size in the Page Setup menu of Word.

Margins. Use the Format: Document command and set margins to at least three quarters of an inch on all sides. If you want to include a header or footer in your e-book, set the top and bottom margins a bit larger. Turn off the Mirror Margins option as well.

Headers and footers. Your e-book should have a running header at the top of the page, for most people this is the book’s title and the page number. Input this information flush left, flush right, or center. There are a few different combinations, so choose something you like. It’s recommended to use a smaller font for the header/footer and italic or bold to make it stand out a bit. Make use of the Border command to create a line between the header and text – this comes out looking quite nice.

Font. Stick to standard fonts such as Times, Times New Roman, Century New Century Schoolbook, or Palatino. Arial or Helvetica are a good choice for chapter headings and subheads. As far as size goes, use 11 points for the main text, and 12-14 for subheads. Test the fonts you’re considering before making a final choice to find a winning combination. Some fonts look better on the screen than when they are printed.

So, you want to learn about the options that Adobe has on offer for performing text search your PDF documents. Adobe does offer a number of tools that can help you find exactly what you want. You can search for specific words inside an open PDF file, within a set of PDF files, PDF files available on the Internet, or within a catalog of indexed PDF documents. You can search for words within the text, layers, and fields of a form, signatures, attachments, bookmarks, comments, document properties and within almost anything you can imagine. Most of the search options are used by Adobe by default whenever you perform a search while for some you have to use specific tools.

To search for words within a PDF file, you can use the Search PDF window or a Find toolbar. While basic function performed by the two options is almost the same, there are differences in the scope of the search performed by both. The Find toolbar allows you to search for text within the current PDF document while the Search PDF window allows you to search more areas by providing advanced options for searching in more than one PDF, indexed PDF or PDF files that are online. Search PDF also allows you to search your attachments to specified in the search options.

You can search for text by using the Search PDF window following some simple steps. To perform a search within a single PDF document, you can first open the PDF document and click on the black binoculars icon. This allows you to perform the basic search. To perform an advanced search, click Use Advanced Search Options. Now to begin searching, type the words, words or parts of a word that you want to search. Now select the search options form the available options by clicking Search Options or specify advanced criteria by clicking Advanced Search Options. Next, click Search. The search results will then appear in the page order with each result bearing an icon to specify its type of occurrence. To open a result item, click an item in the Results list. The occurrence is highlighted and the Back and Forward navigation arrows are enabled that allow you navigate within the results pane. You can keep browsing the results even while the search is being performed by using the keyboard shortcuts. You can stop the search at any time by clicking Stop button that appears under the search results. Doing this will only list the results found till the time you stopped the search. This does not close the search window or delete the occurrences found so far in the search results. Once you stop the search you cannot resume it to search further. For doing this, you will have to start afresh.

The Advanced Search options available in the Search PDF window allow you to enhance the scope of your search or restrict the scope. It allows you to search for exact words or phrases, any word within a set of words or phrases, all the specified words irrespective of their order, Boolean queries. The Look In menu lets you select the location where you want to search. You can either search within the current PDF, an index or a drive on your computer.

PDF (Portable Document Format) files are a common way to transmit, store and retrieve large documents. They are written and formatted in a very specific way and are meant to be "whole" rather than editable parts. Even though they may look like the same type of plain text or graphics that you might produce in a "word" program, they are markedly different. Think of them more in terms of a picture album with each whole page being an individual "snapshot." Unless you use the right tool (converter program) you can no more take one small portion out of the "snapshot" than you can take one element out of a jpeg or other picture file without using "Photoshop"© or some other editing program.

So, how does one convert PDF files to Word documents? Typically, in order to alter the text in a PDF file you would need the original authoring password. This is true even if you want to "cut and paste" a portion of a PDF file into another document. Remember, the PDF format is essentially a "snapshot" or a graphic portrayal of text; it’s not really text itself in the true sense of the word. Because of its design it is difficult, if not impossible, to "copy and paste" a portion of a PDF file directly into a Word or other document. To do this you need a PDF to Word Converter program. This program converts PDF to Word files (or another text document format) by essentially interpreting the "snapshot," which is the PDF file, and making it recognizable as a text file by "Word" or other word processing programs.

Fortunately there are many of these programs available. First look at your local software or office supply store. If you need something right away then a quick search of the internet will produce a number of PDF to Word converter programs that can be purchased at reasonable prices. Often you can download a "free" 30 day trial of the program so you can try it out before paying for it. There are "free" PDF to Word converter programs available for download also. Of course, as with all "free" programs you must be careful about spyware, adware and other types of malware that may be attached to the program.

PDF to Word Converter programs can be a useful tools. By converting PDFs to DOCs one can save hours of typing and editing (don’t forget about copyright and plagiarism issues of course!) You can try different programs, using the "Free Trial" offers, in order to find the best value and the one you’re most comfortable using. Remember, because you’re dealing with two different types of formats a good PDF to Word Converter program will be tremendously helpful in getting the job done.

Data scraping is the process of automatically sorting through information contained on the internet inside html, pdf or other documents and collecting relevent information to into databases and spreadsheets for later retrieval. On most websites, the text is easily and accessibly written in the source code but an increasing number of buisnesses are using Adobe PDF format (Portable Document Format: A format which can be viewed by the free Adobe Acrobat software http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/ on almost any operating system). The advantage of PDF format is that the document looks exactly the same no matter which computer you view it from making it ideal for buisness forms, specification sheets, etc.; the disadvantage is that the text is converted into an image from which you often cannot easily copy and paste. PDF Scraping is the process of data scraping information contained in pdf files. To PDF scrape a PDF document, you must employ a more diverse set of tools.

There are two main types of PDF files: those built from a text file and those built from an image(likely scanned in). Adobe’s own software is capable of PDF scraping from text-based PDF files but special tools are needed for PDF scraping text from image-based PDF files. The primary tool for PDF scraping is the OCR program. OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, programs scan a document for small pictures that they can separate into letters. These pictures are then compared to actual letters and if matches are found, the letters are copied into a file. OCR programs can perform PDF scraping of image-based PDF files quite accurately but they are not perfect.

Once the OCR program or Adobe program has finished PDF scraping a document, you can search through the data to find the parts you are most interested in. This information can then be stored into your favorite database or spreadsheet program. Some PDF scraping programs can sort the data into databases and/or spreadsheets automatically making your job that much easier.

Quite often you will not find a PDF scraping program that will obtain exactly the data you want without customization. Surprisingly a search on google only turned up one business, (the amusingly named ScrapeGoat.com http://www.ScrapeGoat.com) that will create a customized PDF scraping utility for your project. A handful of off the shelf utilities claim to be customizable, but seem to require a bit of programming knowledge and time commitment to use effectively. Obtaining the data yourself with one of these tools may be possible but will likely prove quite tedious and time consuming. It may be advisable to contract a company that specializes in PDF scraping to do it for you quickly and professionally.

Let’s explore some real world examples of the uses of PDF scraping technology. A group at Cornell University wanted to improve a database of technical documents in PDF format by taking the old PDF file where the links and references were just images of text and changing the links and references into working clickable links thus making the database easy to navigate and cross-reference. They employed a PDF scraping utility to deconstruct the PDF files and figure out where the links were. They then could create a simple script to re-create the PDF files with working links replacing the old text image.

Nowadays ebook is becoming more popular as an effective tool to promote any product on the internet. By doing it you are no longer seen as a seller, but as a friend, a helper and someone that can be trusted. However there are a lot of people in the world who like to spend their time by reading books. On the other hand people normally do not enjoy reading advertisements.

In order to create an ebook, there are several steps one has to follow. After you have accomplished authoring your ebook the next thing you have to do is to compile it. You can choose to compile it as an EXE file or as a PDF file. Each type has pros and cons, depending on your needs.

One advantage of compiling your ebook in PDF format is people will be more confident to download it since PDF ebooks are normally not susceptible to viruses. On the other hand files with .EXE extension are like programs or applications hence they are more prone to carrying and transmitting virus.

In addition, with the exact same amount of contents, the size of PDF files is significantly smaller than EXE files, especially if the ebook only consists of several pages.

PDF files are also universal which mean they can be opened and viewed with a PC or a Mac as long as the computer has an installed Acrobat Reader. The number of people who use Mac may not be a huge number but can still be significant to expand your ebook.

But as any other things in this life, there is a drawback of PDF files where they do not support event driven code so that until now you can not insert something like subscription form in your PDF ebook. It is where EXE files come into play. Many .EXE ebook compilers support scripting language that allows you to create special effects, customize menus, and create and modify other user interactivity.

Some compilers also have built-in security features like a feature to prevent your readers from accesing certain pages unless they enter a correct password. Additionally, there is a feature that allows you to set a time limit which is useful to create a demo version of your ebook.

Given the different advantages of one type over the other, choose the extension based on the necessary requirements for your ebook. It is really up to you, the author, to choose which one you think will work best for you.