[jimteacher]

After scanning in books, I ended up with two facing pages that were often askew, causing OCR errors even with Acrobat 8 Pro. The manual two-file drag and drop takes too long, and other software didn't seem to work easily.

But then, AHA! I googled one of your forum archives, and down at the bottom a suggestion was made which didn't seem to work one of the readers - perhaps because of some Mac problem, but it worked WONDERFULLY and INSTANTLY for me, and should work for anyone with a windows machine.

Here's part of the post:
You can use Adobe Acrobat (not the Reader):

1. Choose Adobe PDF printer
2. Set Page Scaling to "Tile Large Pages", set Tile Scale to 100% and overlap to 0
3. Print the document with Adobe PDF printer as a new .pdf file

When I did this with an old book (with hand notations), it ended up with each of the facing pages on a separate page with a lot of white space around it, easily cropped with alternate page cropping.

After alternate page cropping, I used the OCR recognition, which straightened up each of the pages almost perfectly for the best OCR possible.

I had to clean up a few badly skewed pages - and one that had a fold-out chart, but that only took a few minutes, as opposed to the terribly tedious drag and drop from two files method.

Result: Nice, clean, straight, OCRed text which could be used for reading on any PDF reading device.

(In addition, I found that good new copiers have a SCANNER feature which will scan in books and magazines almost instantly as well, instead of the tedious 1-minute-per-page thing which can take hours to do.)

I hope this helps some folks, as it as been a wonderful find for me!