1dollarscan - are the extras worth it?

[thomaspark]

Coincidentally, I posted about my first experience with 1DollarScan just a few days ago. Check out my review here: http://thomaspark.me/2012/12/digitiz...heap-and-easy/

If you send the books by USPS as "media mail", it will cut down on shipping cost.

The regular resolution is more than enough for my needs.

They provide a download link, so you don't have to worry about large email attachments. They send you emails when the book is received and then when it's ready for download.

I'd be happy to answer any other questions.

[xendula]

Becca, once you got a chance to play around with it, can you let us know about the automatic removal of headers and footers on Finereader Express?

[graycyn]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

Will Finereader Express automatically cut out headers and footers/page numbers?

ETA: I just ordered it - for $30, it seemed worth a try.

I don't know about the headers and footers, but you may find it useful to be able to do OCR on occasion regardless. I took some old magazines that I'd been holding onto just because of one or two good articles, scanned the articles, OCR'd, converted the HTML to epub and dumped the magazines.

[mikaelalind]

I just bought PDF Transformer as an early christmas gift to myself. Cheaper, and suits my needs better than Finereader. No more cursing over e-books in pdf format

[BeccaPrice]

I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro - will that let me edit the 1dollarscan files?

[xendula]

^ Should, because you get PDFs. I have it as well, so now trying to figure out if I need Finereader for the footers/headers.

[chainring]

Originally Posted by BeccaPrice

I've got Adobe Acrobat Pro - will that let me edit the 1dollarscan files?

Yes. Run an OCR on the pdf and use ClearScan.

[BeccaPrice]

The PDF comes pre-OCR'd from 1DollarScan.

What I found when I used Adobe Acrobat Pro to save it as html is that it didn't make a distinction between line breaks and paragraph breaks, so the formatting is horrible, even though the OCR is pretty good.

Will ClearScan or FineReader distinguish between them so I can get rid of extraneous <br/> and not have the document be one big paragraph?

[Berzelius]

Re FineReader, I was extremely lucky to get a free copy of version 5 off a magazine cover disk many years ago and I've used it ever since. I've tried one or two free OCRs but it's like comparing a thoroughbred racehorse to a nag destined for the knacker's yard.

[computer-girl]

Assuming that you did NOT pay the additional $2 per set for High Compression, have you used Adobe Acrobat to compress any files pdf from 1DollarScan and save them to another PDF file?

If so can you give the original PDF file size vs. the compressed PDF file size with Acrobat?

If you have not done the above compression, would you (or any one else who is willing) kindly take a moment and run this test for me?

Lastly, has anyone used to Acrobat to improve the OCR on the 1DollarScan pdf, assuming you paid only for the basic OCR and not the high quality OCR?

[mrevent]

I second chainring's "Clearscan" suggestion. Generally, it's not better than Abbyy, and if the ultimate aim is to convert pdf to epub, go for Abbyy. Yet, to have a small size pdf file, Clearscan works great with 1dollarscan scans. One can reduce the file size of a near 200 mb book to 5-10 MB with that. Since the scans are good quality, Clearscan reads the file well.

It seems, for 1dollarscan pdf's, that's better than "Reducing File Size" with Acrobat --I did it once, and although I don't remember the precise difference in size of the original versus the reduced file, it was not too impressive.

[jeffcdo]

How does this process deal with the photo section of say, a typical autobiography? If I OCR using Abbyy, can I still preserve the pictures after the conversion to epub?