PDF to Manuscript · Old Edition to Editable Word
Send us the PDF of your book, including a book already formatted for print, and get back a clean, editable manuscript: Word, Times New Roman, your chapters, italics and footnotes intact, the page numbers and headers gone. Ready for edits, changes, or a fresh design with BookDesigner.ai. $199.99 per book, and we tell you for free whether it will work before you pay a cent.
Check My PDF FreeThe check costs nothing and commits you to nothing. If we cannot recover your book cleanly, we say so and charge you nothing.
Your book is never used to train AI. Ever.
The running head and the page number come off. The chapter title becomes a real heading, the italics stay italic, and footnote 4 becomes a real Word footnote at its marker rather than a loose line at the foot of a page.
From the team behind BookDesignTemplates.com, trusted by first-time authors since 2011. Real people who have designed books for fifteen years, now working for you.
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Who This Is For
Every one of these reaches our inbox, and the story is always the same: the book is real, it printed, it sold, and the file it was made from is somewhere nobody can reach.
The designer retired, the agency folded, or the layout files open in nothing you own any more. The printed book and its PDF are all that survived, and the catalogue still has to be reissued, corrected and sold.
A former typesetter, or a service that has since closed, delivered you a finished PDF and never the Word file behind it. You want to fix a paragraph, add a chapter or move to a new printer, and you cannot touch your own book.
You hold the rights to a book that went out of print before anyone kept digital masters. Getting the text back is the first step of every reissue, translation, audiobook and new edition.
Translators and agents come for the same reason: you cannot work on a book you can only read.
Before You Pay Anything
Upload the PDF and Cantos reads it on the spot, at no charge, and answers a plain yes or no with the numbers it measured: how many pages, how many words it recovered, how many chapter headings it found, how many footnotes, whether every page carries real text underneath, and whether any page numbers or running heads leaked into the text. Then you decide. A no costs you nothing.
The Deliverable
US Letter, one inch margins, Times New Roman 12 point, double spaced, with a half inch first line indent. Standard manuscript format: the clean place any other work starts from, whether that is an editor, a translator, a proofreader or a fresh design.
A table, an illustration or a page of verse that cannot come across as itself is counted and named on your report, so you know exactly what to look at. We would rather tell you than quietly invent something.
And Then It Is Checked
A conversion breaks in a small number of known ways: a word lost at a page turn, a sentence that stops mid thought, a hyphen joined wrongly, a stray page number that slipped through, a footnote landing away from its marker. So once the conversion is done, Cantos reads the finished manuscript looking for exactly those things, and only those things. What it fixes comes back as tracked changes you accept or reject in your own word processor, with a report of what it found and where. It never rewrites your prose. This is a check that your book is complete and correct, not an edit of your writing.
The Price
The manuscript, the report, the set aside file, and the verification pass with its tracked changes. No subscription, no deadline, and nothing else to buy.
Then $49.99 comes off the Interior when the same book goes on to a fresh design with us. The recovery is the on ramp, not a toll.
This one is paid before the work runs. Our interiors work the other way around, and this one cannot: the manuscript is the entire deliverable, so there is no way to show it to you without giving it to you. The free determination above is how we keep that fair. You pay knowing the page count, the word count, the chapter count and our verdict. Never blind.
Being Straight With You
If your PDF is a photograph of printed pages with no text underneath, we cannot recover it reliably, and we will not pretend otherwise. The determination tells you at the door and charges nothing. If the original print file still exists anywhere, send that instead.
You get a manuscript, not a rebuild of the old edition’s design. That is the point: one clean typeface and no furniture is what an editor, a translator or a new interior needs. If you want the book set again, that is the interior step, with sixteen designs and nine trim sizes.
You must own or hold the rights to the text you send us. We do not adjudicate rights and we convert only what you tell us is yours to convert. If the book is not yours, this is not the service for it.
One App, The Whole Book
Your manuscript is yours the moment it lands, with no obligation to do anything else here. But it is already in the right place: set it fresh as a new book, copyedit it, give it a new cover, or publish it in another language.
Why We Built This
A publisher wrote to us about a backlist he could not touch. The books were printed, the books were selling, and the files behind them had died with a version of software nobody runs any more. All he had was the PDF of each finished book, which is the one thing you cannot edit.
That is a solvable problem, and it is the kind of unglamorous work that decides whether a book gets a second life. Getting the words back out cleanly, with the chapters and the italics and the footnotes where the author put them, is the first step of every reissue, correction, translation and new edition.
So we built it, and we built it to be honest: a free answer first, the numbers in front of you, and a plain no when a file is beyond what we can recover exactly. Your words stay yours. We claim no copyright on your book and we never use your manuscript to train AI.
Tracy Atkins, founder
Before You Start
One Word file with your whole book in it, in standard manuscript format: US Letter, Times New Roman 12 point, double spaced, your chapters as real headings, your bold and italics where they were, and your footnotes as real Word footnotes. Alongside it: a report of what was found and what was set aside, the set aside file itself, and a tracked changes copy showing everything the verification pass corrected.
The determination runs first and it is free. Cantos reads your PDF and answers yes or no with the numbers: pages, words recovered, chapter headings, footnotes, whether every page carries real text underneath, and whether any page numbers leaked into the text. If the answer is no, you are told why in plain words and charged nothing at all.
Not yet. If the PDF is a picture of printed pages with no text underneath, we refuse it at the door and charge nothing, because we sell only what we can recover exactly. A scan that already carries a text layer from an earlier conversion is a different case: we measure the quality of that text and show you the verdict before you decide.
Because the manuscript is the whole product. With an interior we can build your book and show you a watermarked proof, so you see everything before you decide. Here there is nothing to show that is not the deliverable itself. The free determination is how we keep it fair: you know the page count, the word count, the chapter count and our verdict before any money moves.
Only if you ask for that separately. What comes back is a manuscript: one typeface, one page size, no running heads, no page numbers. That is what an editor, a translator or a new design needs. If you want it set as a book again, the interior step does that with our sixteen designs and nine trim sizes, and part of what you paid here comes off it.
Yes. You must own or hold the rights to the text you upload. We do not adjudicate rights and we convert only what you tell us is yours to convert.
Yes, and please write to us at cantos@bookdesigner.ai before you start rather than uploading fifty files one at a time. Tell us roughly how many titles and how they were originally produced, and we will run the free determination across a sample first, so you know what the catalogue as a whole looks like.
Your files sit in your account so you can download them again, and you can delete any project or your entire account whenever you like. Your book is never sold, licensed, shared, or used to train AI.
The check is free, the answer is honest, and the manuscript is yours to do anything with.
Check My PDF FreeFree determination first. Never used to train AI.