AKICIDW [*]

[piranha]

with the boat work really entering the last stages now, i'm looking at my shelves full of books, and ponder scanning them. now, i have lots of experience scanning manga, as well as scanning prose and OCRing it. but the books i most want to scan myself because there are no digital copies out there are craft books.

which are often beautifuly laid out, and that presents a problem. of course the easiest is just making a pdf from the images, but that results in enormous files, and means the text can't be be searched. i'm big on searching these days, especially when it comes to patterns.

does anyone have experience with scanning such books and recreating something similar to the original before it went to press? any suggestions for software (i prefer mac, but can deal with windows and linux)? workflow?

[* = all knowledge is contained in dreamwith]

Comments

[piranha]

all sorts of things can be inside a PDF; text (which is searchable) is only one of those. it can also contain drawings (vector art) which can be resized easily. or raster images (which cannot be resized).

when one scans, one creates a raster image of text and/or graphics. the text is not machine-readable unless it has been through a process called OCR (optical character recognition). OCR is pretty good these days, if you make a good, clean scan. the problem is that craft and other how-to books contain lots of images lined up with text that refers to them. which means automatic processing (shove files in one side, get searchable text out the other) goes kind of out of the window.