Thanks so much Maxmixiv!
I get the gist of this now...

If you meant that the topic was hard to write about in English; don't worry, there are practically no mistakes with what you wrote, it's perfect English. A very inignificant spelling mistake (mysterious) and a tiny expression miss (should be "cook UP"). I make mistakes like this myself sometimes and I am practically a native speaker. Your English is top notch.

WELL - I am determined to figure this out!
I scanned a Russian book myself and I am determined that the scan should be a proper text PDF and DJVU, so that it is possible to cut and paste from it.

Plus I downloaded a bunch of books from the awesome uztranslations site. I want to put some of them on my ebook reader with text and not pictures.

Because of this problem, people who scan Russian language text / course / school books mainly keep them as picture based PDFs, and that is a real shame! I want to crack this problem.

I definitely understand the essence of what you are saying. I will have a go at it this weekend (since I am practically housebound at the moment, due to hurting my feet!)

This is as far as I am getting tonight:

I managed to add accents in Microsoft word, using the symbol chart, like you suggested. I did not succeed with the MS character map for some reason.