Noctorum Posted April 20, 2004 Share Posted April 20, 2004 Hello, I have a decent-sized library of books in my room, and I'd love to transfer them onto my computer for more convenient reading on the road. I have a scanner, and scan them into the computer fast enough, but once I have all the pictures sorted, its annoying to have to pass through them all as reading. Is there a program or method to quickly combine each of them as pages into an Adobe PDF? Thanks very much, ~Alex Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmanmcp Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 Alex, its not simple or easy. In "theory" you would scan a page and run it thru an OCR(Optical Character Recognition program) and then convert the ouput into a PDF document. Thats the "simple" explanation, doing it is the hard part. Character recognition is never perfect and lots of errors and problems are usually encountered and the output is usually not the way it started out. You spend time fixing editing and formating a page before moving on to the next and this gets to be difficult with more and more pages. Anyway, I use a program called OmniPage which will do the scanning and OCR work, and it works in conjunction with Microsoft Word to save as a document. From Here you will need to get the Professional version of Adobe Acrobat so you can convert the word files into a PDF. Now iOmniPage may work the same with Acrobat but I am not sure since I don't have the Professional version. Good luck. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaJill Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 (edited) Adobe Acrobat 6, Professional can do this natively... Open up Adobe Acrobat Professional version 6. Go to file -> Create PDF -> From Scanner. In create PDF there is also an option "from multiple files" so if you have scans already done that should help. I hope? =) {edited addition} of course this won't OCR it; so it will be just a graphic image of the scanned page. Should be fine for reading, and it is what you requested. Getting involved with OCR is a different level that I'm not familiar with, but madman has addressed nicely. =) if you don't want ocr, it's very simple and easy, though! Edited April 21, 2004 by TCH-Lisa Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Madmanmcp Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 Cool Lisa, and how much space do these scans take up? I would assume a "book" would become rather large, but it would be large as a word document as I explained also Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LisaJill Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 No idea, I've never done this. I'm sorry =/ Whatever a normal, text based pdf document is per page, multiplied by the number of pages of the book? *blushes* I just knew I had seen the ability to do it; but I've never utilized this. I can see how very useful this is going to be for research and texts when I can lug my notebook to the library; time to get a pen scanner for those important quote! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Virtual Imager Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 Madmanmcp Posted on Apr 20 2004, 05:22 PM From Here you will need to get the Professional version of Adobe Acrobat so you can convert the word files into a PDF. Just one other thought... if you don't have or don't want to get Adobe Professional, you can also go online to do it. I believe the first five files (any size, if I'm not mistaken) are free. https://createpdf.adobe.com/index.pl/904338...579?BP=IE&v=AHP VI Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GroovyFish Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 If some of your books are classics, you may want to check out Project Gutenberg to see if they have it. The few I have downloaded are either in plain text or PDF format. It should save a bit of time http://gutenberg.net/ Project Gutenberg is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books (eBooks or etexts). Our present collection of more than 10.000 eBooks was produced by hundreds of volunteers. Most of the Project Gutenberg eBooks are older literary works that are in the public domain in the United States. All may be freely downloaded and read, and redistributed for non-commercial use... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bellringr Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 We scan in documents to pdfs at work and combine them all the time. A normal text-only 8 1/2 x 11 document can be as small as 10-25k depending how you save it, so we're not talking tiny once you get them all together, but it's not that horrible considering it's a whole book. To cut down on the size, when you scan to a pdf, choose Screen in the properties (can't remember the exact name of the field atm, sorry) and set the dpi as low as you can and still have it easily readable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kaseytraeger Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 We scan in documents to pdfs at work and combine them all the time. A normal text-only 8 1/2 x 11 document can be as small as 8-10k depending how you save it, so we're not talking tiny once you get them all together, but it's not that horrible considering it's a whole book. I have Adobe Acrobat Professional 6 on my work computer. Like bellringr, I've converted many documents to PDF format. What I've discovered is that sometimes the PDF file takes up more space than the original document! For example, I had a MS Word document that was 33K. The equivalent PDF version was 52K! Just be careful of this when you go to convert any files to PDF, especially if you're concerned about file size. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bellringr Posted April 21, 2004 Share Posted April 21, 2004 Now that I'm at work and can look at it, under Adobe PDF Settings/General Conversion Settings, choose Screen. Never just click on the button in Word (or other MS applications) that automatically converts it for you. Just to give you an idea, I took a Word document (one page) with b/w and color text. Clicking on the button in Word made an 81kb pdf. Doing a File/Print with ebook as the setting made it 74kb. Choosing Screen brought it down to 22kb. Oddly enough, 600dpi and 200dpi turned out the same. I thought it would make a difference, but I guess not. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ThumpAZ Posted April 22, 2004 Share Posted April 22, 2004 There is also a free pdf maker called PDF995 that can be used to print to pdf, just like a normal printer. To make multiple image or doc files into one pdf file, you need the full version of Acrobat, as it allows you to insert, remove and arrange individual pages in the file. One good tip when dealing with PDFs... Do not ever use the same name for your final Save... Use the Save As function and give it a new name. You will be amazed at the savings this little extra step will net you. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
KevinW Posted May 31, 2004 Share Posted May 31, 2004 Glenn, when talking about using the 'File > Save As', are you referring to PDF995? I've used this product for several years now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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