Please suggest scanner/software for 50 novels

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by Jim Thompson

About page 4 might be the first that has standard header/footer. So after scanning the 200 pages, I would use ABBYY Profesional to select the 4th page, I would use the mouse to draw 3 zones: 1) header, 2) text, 3) footer. I would tell ABBYY that I want to ignore (eliminate from OCR) the header and footer zone.

There isn't any "ignore this block." You would only draw 1 zone, for the main text.

Then I would save those zone blocks. Then I would want to select all 200 pages (is that one-click/operation?) and apply the zone blocks to all 200 pages (again just one click/operation?). Is that how it would work?

Selecting all 200 pages is a matter of selecting the first page in the thumbnail view window, holding the shift key, scrolling to the bottom, and selecting the final page. Not one-click, but simple & obvious.

Applying them is a matter of using the dropdown menus and navigating to wherever you've saved the blocks out, but still easy.

I looked at some novels to write this and see a challenge. On some novels there is as little as 1/8" between the header and the body of the text. What's worse, the pages are not physically consistent. When I measure the inches from the top of the physical piece of paper to the printed header, it may vary by 1/8" or so. Also, the variation can be page-by-page (as opposed to 50 pages one way and 50 pages another). Ouch! Those books will be a challenge if I can't get them printed in a different format. Do you have any suggestions for easy block zoning with that kind of book or will those require eyeballing each page???

If the margins are tight (including space between header & main text), it may require eyeballing each page. However, you can still apply the blocks all at once, and then flip through the pages quickly and just look for any that didn't work right, and adjust those blocks as necessary. It comes out to a few seconds per page. (An annoying few seconds per page, admittedly. Those few seconds add up.)

If you've got different sets of pages--like, odd & even pages being mirrored--it's easy to save out two different sets of blocks, and apply them to only the odd or only the even pages. That requires some hassle in selecting the pages; there's no automatic way to select "only the odd pages." But you can right-click and drag in the thumbnail area, so you can set it to two pages wide, and click and drag.

[Jim Thompson]

Thanks for your patient explanation. I'll go with ABBYY. It looks doable. I'm reading good things about it on forums and I can't even find a forum where people are discussing OmniPage.

[wayrad]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

FR will allow zoning templates of a sort; it'll let you create a page-zone template and apply it to as many pages as you like. It won't "ignore headers/footers," but if the pages are the same size & shape, the zoning template will do that.

If you tell Finereader 9.0 to save to Word format, there is an option to ignore headers/footers.

[Jim Thompson]

Thanks. That's good to know.