Re: scanning for editable file

[Peter Cassidy pcassidy@xxxxxxxx]

As a sidenote, I recently had to give away my ancient and honorable Acer
scanner because I could not get the parallel port unit to work with the
new desktop, understatedly named Death Star, even with a parallel port
card and, finally, a custom cable to convert parallel port connectors to
USB pinset standard. A shame as it had a slightly larger than Letter
sized scan bed. I have to scan music manuscript sometimes and that
margin mattered a lot.

Its replacement, a Mustek A3 scanner, has an 11+ by 16+ inch scan bed
and really lets you go to town on just about any sized manuscript. I
haven't tried it with an OCR application yet but I have no doubt it
could work well with OCR software. Worth inquiring about still before
purchase. The little bit of extra room really enhances its usability
though YMMV.

Peter

Fredric Gross wrote:
> I am using a Fujitsu S510 ScanSnap. Inexpensive, reasonably fast, and
> will scan to Word or Excel, as well as to PDF. Much as I detest Word,
> the S510 cuts out a cumbersome step as compared to Nathan's "bigger
> job than it appears."
>
> Fred
>
>
>
> Nathan Sivin wrote:
>> Getting editable files depends mainly on the Optical Character
>> Recognition (OCR) software, which transforms an image of words into
>> text. It is included with good-quality printers, but it is not as
>> capable as the better standalone OCR programs. I use ReadIris, since
>> it is highly accurate and can handle most foreign languages.
>>
>> If you make a PDF file using Acrobat or some similar program, you can
>> specify making it searchable. What that does is to use Acrobat's
>> built-in OCR program, which is not top of the line but is not bad, to
>> hide a text file in back of the image. It is then possible, using
>> Readiris, to extract it to make a file in any common format. In other
>> words, the person who scans the documents doesn't have to be the one
>> who makes the text files from the PDF's.
>>
>> This is a bigger job than it appears. No OCR program is perfectly
>> accurate, so someone has to proofread everything. And any document
>> that is not clearly printed on clean paper is likely to contain a lot
>> of mistakes. I will be glad to pitch in on the conversion part of the
>> job, but it will be way too much for one or two people.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Nathan