How to convert scanned book page to editable PDF?

[C.B. Stewart]

Warriors,

My dad's got an old how-to book he wrote in the late '70s. It's got great content, lots of diagrams and pictures, and we're interested in making it into a PDF to sell online.

I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro 9, and it does OCR just fine -- except that I can't figure out how to change the font of the text! Every page is a combination of images and text, and I basically want to convert each scanned page into an editable document with the same layout of the original document. (The font in the book is a little dated.)

Does anyone have any tips on how to do this -- automatically convert a scanned book page into an easy-to-edit PDF document that keeps all formatting (images, paragraph layout, etc) intact?

Thanks!
C.B. Stewart

[C.B. Stewart]

Bumping this thread to see if anyone has any suggestions.

Thanks again!

[Obama]

There are software doing that I tried in the past but nothing automatic; needs lots of manual tweaking. Forgot software name, search google for "convert pdf to word" or something like that.

[Dan C. Rinnert]

ABBYY FineReader - Professional OCR Software for Document and PDF Conversion Application

It claims to be able to do all that. But I don't have any firsthand experience with it.

They appear to have a trial version though.

[bobsstuff]

Here is some FREEWARE, topOCR at Digital Camera OCR , that I downloaded a while back (a year or more) to convert my typed notes to word documents. I wanted to use my camera instead of scanner to capture the pages.

I started the project and dropped it so my memory of the product is slipping. However, as I recall it did a pretty good job with documents I copied with my digital camera. There were a number of errors on each page, but a spell checker fixed them fairly quickly. Some words needed cross referenced to the original document because they were pretty messed up.

My Epson scanner came with software that has a "scan to OCR" feature that does the same thing. I wanted to use a camera because it "scans" pages in a second or two, whereas the scanner takes a lot longer per page.

Anyway, it's free and worth the try. If you are leery of the website, places like TUCOWS also have it.

ON EDIT: I just uninstalled my topOCR version 2.6 and installed the newer version 3.1
Maybe it will be even better now. Maybe I will get back to editing my notes using my camera and OCR (topOCR) OH, for those that might not know, OCR = optical character recognition

[Anup Mahajan]

Here is another software that can help you

SimpleOCR - freeware OCR software and royalty free OCR engine!

Cheers,

[Steve Peters Benn]

PDF isn't editable btw, so it would be an idea to OCR it to a word document.

[intromaster]

You can also try Elance. I've seen people posting this type of task frequently.

It wasn't expensive either.

[tj]

If the pdf is not created from a "image only" source, Adobe offers you the option to save the file as a word file. When you chose this option it saves the file as a word format with the formatting as close as possible. Problem with Adobe is that they save the text in the word file as an object with the text included , that gives you only limited options to change the formatting of the word file if needed.

Timo

[jacktackett]

One thing we used to do when OCR programs were first on the scene was to put the document through several of them and then merge the results. Word Perfect handled this well in its day so not sure how word or OoO would today. But its a thought.

As someone else suggested - you may want to farm this out to be updated- elance, etc or amazon turks - 100 pages? send to 100 turks for 1$ each. Who knows?

There are plenty of typists available in the back of Writer's Digest still too. You may want to check them out. Same with transcriptionists- though they mostly work from recordings rather than texts.

Good luck,
--Jack

[mannex]

I've had good experiences with ABBYY PDF Transformer 2.0. It's fairly cheap.

Couple of secrets.

1. Use white out tape to white out page headers, footers and page numbers. Reduces the junk in the OCR process.

2. Do the OCR into a MS Word document. Then, "Select All" the text and "Paste Special" as Unformatted Text into a new Word document. You will lose all the formatting, but the text should be fairly clean and you can apply consistent reformatting in the new document.

[darktemplar]

I use this program called 'Nitro PDF' and it ROCKS. I've been able to do pretty much anything I can imagine with creating, editing, securing, importing and exporting files from and into a PDF format.

Website:
Nitro PDF Software - Create & Edit PDF Files (not an affiliate link )

[achivement84]

Hey,

There are many prg. over the web that offer you free service, but you still have to review your document.

If you will not need this software regularly so you may benefit from a free trial of a good software, i can give you some examples as follow:-

Convert PDF to Word (.doc) with Able2Doc Converter - Free Trial
OCR Terminal: Online OCR - Convert PDF to Word, JPEG to Word,
Convert scanned documents to text, Convert scanned documents to text with OCR Converter

And you can find even much more.

B.Regards..

[C.B. Stewart]

Thank you for the suggestions, everyone!

I use a Mac running OS X and have Parallels installed so both Mac and PC options work for me.

What I ended up going with was a newer program for the Mac called Prizmo (Prizmo 1.1 + OCR in 10 languages | Creaceed). It's pretty cool -- I can take quick snaps of each page of the book with a digital camera (takes just about five seconds to get each page) and put them into this program, which then straightens it out, makes it black and white, and has EXTREMELY accurate OCR. It exports as PDF with just text and the formatting in place (so I can just use a second PDF editing program to paste images in), or as PDF with hidden text behind the straightened-out image.

The program is meant to be a way to use your digital camera as a scanner, and works brilliantly for that purpose. In fact, it's higher quality and faster than using a scanner, and the OCR is super accurate.

Thanks again for all the suggestions, everyone!
C.B. Stewart

[ankitnagpal]

You can try this ocr software It can create searchable pdf and text-only pdf too.