Scanning Books

[Rick_R]

One of the things I've done on a number of occasions is scan in an entire book, convert it to PDF, and then us OCR (Optical Character Recognition) so I can resize the text on a tablet.

In my case it's because of my eyesight--I'm 67 years old and extremely nearsighted, so fonts in many books are just too small to read. When possible I buy Kindle editions, but many older books are not available in electronic format.

This post covers several aspects:

1) You can take a book to Office Depot, Staples, etc. They can cut off the spine for about $1, which gives you the stack of pages.

2) Scan them in a sheetfed scanner with the free IrfanView program, not PSP. IrfanView allows all sorts of specialized automatic image numbering, e.g., counting backwards by 2's. You'll scan the odd pages: 1, 3, 5, etc., then flip the stack and scan the even pages, which will start at the highest number: 240, 238, 236, etc.

3) In PSP, rotate the few pages that are in landscape, and merge 2-page images.

4) Unless you had a really good scanner and a high-quality book, the text might not be exactly horizontal. (I've found that the one at my job tilts pages slightly.)

5) Text will be slightly off-center, with even-numbered left-hand pages more toward one side and odd-numbered right-hand more toward the other.

On a typical odd (or even) page, set a rectangular selection and Save Selection. You'll need two--one for odd and one for even. Move your saved selection for the other page and save it under a new name (e.g., Scan-O and Scan-E).

6) Create a script that loads a saved selection, and bind the script. Repeat with the other selection.

7) I've created a new Books Scan toolbar with the following buttons:

a) Straighten
b) Odd Page
c) Even Page
d) Edit Selection
e) Move
f) Crop to Selection
g) Save
h) Close

With these I don't have to click through multiple levels of menus to do certain things.

8) Load an image, Straighten, click the Odd or Even button to activate the selection. If the box isn't properly centered, Edit Selection, Move, click on the selection area, move it, re-click Edit Selection, Crop, Save, Close.

9) To convert to PDF, get PowerPDF from Nuance. Older versions are PDF Converter Pro, available for around $40 (versus $300 for Adobe Acrobat). Nuance's OCR is much better than Acrobat's.

[Jean-Luc]

It is very interesting when users explain with precise steps their workflow. It may help others to accomplish similar task without the need to experiment and fail.
Thank you for your message !
:>)

[Radim]

Hello,

I also scanned a few colorful books, totaly about 2000 pages.
I found very helpful ScanTailor - http://scantailor.org/

And recently I discovered that Adobe Acrobat can from images that are slightly rotated and not pure white bg make quite good job also.

[steven19]

Hey,


One of my friend looking for book scanning and he want to scan a book of 1000 pages for his office purpose, for him this post is helpful.
Thank you from his side:)