[MBHockey]

Hi all,

So I purchased a paperback textbook that i plan to get unbound and scan to PDF. I borrowed my friend's Canon P-215 and have really never used one much before.

I have this scanner for only a few days and i'm trying to find the best way to do this.

First off, the scanner does not work with Image Capture which means i think i am stuck using Canon's software to scan the pages in. It's pretty basic, though (the software). I want to figure out the best way to (using an iTunes CD-ripping analogy) get a "lossless" copy of each page of the book on to my computer from which i can decide how to compress it into the final giant PDF because I only have the scanner for a week or so.

It will scan to PDF (where you can only specify High compression or low compression; low being better quality but larger PDF), .Tiff (which has no options), or .jpeg (which out of the three, looked the best when i put the quality as the highest). But because I would then have to make it into a big PDF, maybe i'm just better off using the low compression PDFs out of the individual pages, since I'd have to convert .tiff or .jpeg to PDF at some point down the line.

The reason I want to make it a PDF is so i can read/annotate it on my iPad.

Also, it seems that if the scanner worked with Image Capture, I'd have a wider array of 3rd party software to choose from and be able to more finely tune the kind of quality in the files I want. This is what my limited research has turned up.

Another important thing is that it gets OCR'ed. The scanner has this built in and will output to PDF with the file already searchable (but in my one page of text i tested, it definitely wasn't 100%). So that is another thing -- is there a different program I can use to OCR the original document that is better than whatever OCR technology is built into the scanner?

[PB PM]

Tiff, which will be 16bit, is the closest you'll get to lossless through Canon's scanners.

[MBHockey]

But I cannot OCR a .tiff image with the Canon software (and it isn't too great for PDFs anyway).

Is there other software that would be better than Canon's at OCR that i could run the scanned pages through?

[turtle]

ReadIris is what I've used and it works pretty good. I got it free with my HP multifunction but I'm sure it's for sale based on the amount of junk they send me to upgrade or order more from them.

[MBHockey]

Ok thanks, I'll give ReadIris a look. It seems pretty powerful just based on their site and reviews around the web.

Edit: Figured out how to change the resolution of scans. But I have a new question that I hope isn't worded too confusingly:

Is there a way to make the PDF such that computers and iPads recognize the text as "actual text" and not simply text as an OCR'ed image?

What I mean is, on retina displays, when the app "knows" that it's displaying text, no matter how far you zoom in, it still looks clear and sharp. Like if i'm in Safari, i can really zoom in on text and it is always crisp and clear. However, when I scan a page of text in, as soon as I start zooming in it gets very pixellated and fuzzy. It seems like if this were possible, the text would be inherently searchable, and you wouldn't have to even worry about OCR. Right?

[MBHockey]

Just an update -- I was able to scan the book with great results. I spoke to my uncle who is in digital publishing and I borrowed his MacBook for a few days to use Adobe Acrobat X. It has this technology called ClearScan which makes for really nice OCR'ed documents in amazingly small file sizes. The PDF's text looks great on my iPad.

The scanner was great too, but since it's a portable one I had to scan 20 pages at a time. a bit of a hassle!

[MBHockey]

AH!!!

I need help guys

After scanning the books on my uncle's computer using ClearScan for OCR, i opened them on my computer with Preview and I think it saved them funky when i closed the program. Now, the PDFs aren't searchable! They were before I had ever opened them with Preview.

I have tried Googling for the last hour and cannot find a way to make these PDFs searchable again. This is a disaster

Anything i can do?

Why is Preview such an asshole?