Abbyy Finereader - Questions about Saving OCRd file..

[martienne]

Hi! Hope somebody can help..!

I did OCR on a PDF file that had been scanned to pictures only. I.e. the text could not be highlighted.

It was a humongous job since the book has plenty of diagrams, tables, pictures.

I am now trying to save the document to a nice professional looking PDF, but I am finding that I can't!

I tried saving to PDF. This gives me a pdf that looks EXACTLY as the original version, same grainy grey table headers and wobbly fonts... Only difference is that the fonts can be highlighted.

• I tried saving to Word 2007 as Exact Copy and got an error message.
• Saving as "Editable Copy" in Word gives a doc were many of the tables, pictures etc are in the wrong place + page breaks from the original PDF are not respected.
• Saving as djvu got the same effect as saving to PDF, a file that looks like the original, but with text that can be highlighted.

I want a professional looking PDF in the same layout that I currently have in the ABBYY scanned file.

Am I missing something?

Does anyone know what I need to do to achieve that... ?

[DSpider]

Here's the skinny: OCR, proofread the entire thing in FineReader, track down the fonts (or fonts that look similar), vectorize the graphics and/or process the photos that can't be vectorized, spend a heck of lot of time redoing the layout in Word or InDesign, export as PDF and then proofread the final product.

The quality will be very good, and it's always a pleasure to read such a book. But not many people are willing to put in the effort.

You will find many more posts on this forum about this. Search the forums, google. Some training videos on using Word, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc wouldn't hurt either. As open-source alternatives there's LibreOffice, Scribus, Inkscape, etc. They're also very good and will do the job nicely, and Youtube is full of tutorials on using them. But in the end it still comes down to you, because you're the one that has to put in the hours, learning as you go along.

Such a book can even take up a month or two, depending on the level of interest you have in the material. So make sure it's worth it, and that it's not already available as an e-book.

[Iznogood]

Originally Posted by martienne

I tried saving to PDF. This gives me a pdf that looks EXACTLY as the original version, same grainy grey table headers and wobbly fonts... Only difference is that the fonts can be highlighted.

When you are saving as PDF, there is probably an options-button. Pust it; my guess is that you're saving the file as "text under image", i.e that you keep the original image on top. You could try saving as text only (tick off for keeping images) and export it as PDF.

[DSpider]

FineReader is not a layout program. In the current version (v11), there is no ruler or anything like that, no options for indentation or paragraph spacing. You need Word (Microsoft Office), Writer (LibreOffice), Adobe InDesign, Scribus, etc., and do (or rather, redo) the layout yourself.