Re: An improved method for scanning documents

[salfter@alfter.diespammersdie.us (Scott Alfter)]

In article <e090cu$jbf$1@unlnews.unl.edu>,
Ed Eastman  <noone@nowhere.net> wrote:
>Scott Alfter wrote:
>> I've recently figured out a method that uses freely-available tools to scan
>> images and text and store them into PDFs that can be handled by any number
>> of programs (Adobe Reader, Preview.app, KPDF, etc.)  Starting with a
>> high-resolution, high-bit-depth scan (600 dpi, 24 bpp), text and image
>> blocks are identified and written to separate files.  These files are then
>> combined to form a one-page PDF of reasonably small size.  PDFs can be
>> concatenated to create multi-page documents that are easily printed or
>> OCR'd.
>
>I've been looking for a similar soultion except that I WANT the OCR to 
>happen before 'the merge' as you describe it.  I want TEXT in the file 
>for indexing and searchability which can't be done with the text as a 
>picture.

One possibility here would be to merge the text blocks into a PDF, run it
through OCR, render the text to a PDF (and then to PostScript...Ghostscript
can do this conversion), and merge the images with the text.

You'd most likely need to go through the text to make sure it's properly
formatted; you could do that while you're proofreading it.  You'll most
likely end up with the text in a different font than the original, but one
advantage would be even smaller size.

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