Publishing in Mandarin Chinese and English

Despite the fact that I do not speak or read Mandarin Chinese, I was hired to republish a book of Chinese poetry with English translations that had already been published in Taiwan. This project involved resizing the interior and covers for the hard cover and paperback editions for KDP, but also involved turning the provided pdf into an epub for electronic Kindle editions.

The author's son assured me that the Chinese characters were read from left to right and that even though I could not read it, I could organize it in just the same way that I would the English. I discovered that the Unicode system indeed has over 98,000 Chinese characters which are handled by software in the same way as our Latin alphabet. So, I simply had to extract all of the Chinese and English text from the pdf he provided and copy it all into an odt file. Then, after setting the "Heading 1" styles and handling the footnotes, the process of epub creation proceeded in the normal way. Even the Table of Contents was created in the normal way. The general principles that govern English epubs also govern Chinese epubs.