Suggestions? Scan foreign language books & make non-searchable pdf

1611mac · 12-04-2013, 12:12 PM

I have fast and perfect way of converting paper books in English to epub/mobi using a scanner with an ADF, Abbyy Finereader, Calibre (conversion), etc.

I now need to scan some foreign language books (Nepali, German, etc) and I want to save them as simple Non-Searchable pdfs. (basically scanned images in a pdf). I do not want to OCR them.

The problem I have is that when I use my ADF the page images are not always well centered and straight.

Any suggestions?

I have a Mac running both OSX and Windows (ABBYY FineReader). I can scan with any number of scan utilities (Apple Image Capture for example) or scan in FineReader. I know how to convert tiff to pdf, assemble pdfs, crop, etc in Acrobat Pro. As I said, I easily make OCR'd epubs and mobi's.

But what I can't figure out is how to simply "center and straighten" a page image somewhat automatically without having to manually rotate and "jog" hundreds of image pages in software.

I have a book scanner arriving today (Plustekk OpticBook 3800 RT) that will help yield consistent scans (image placement) but I really hate to have to scan hundreds of pages one by one (without an ADF).

Again, any suggestions?

.

Toxaris · 12-04-2013, 02:58 PM

You can run your scans through scantailor to make fix them. That should take care of the straightning and centering.

1611mac · 12-04-2013, 09:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Toxaris

You can run your scans through scantailor to make fix them. That should take care of the straightning and centering.

Perfect... thanks. I'll check it out! Appreciate the info.

Tex2002ans · 12-05-2013, 01:33 AM

You should visit the treasure trove over at the DIY Bookscanner forums:

http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/

There is a ton of tutorials/information over there on what people do to fix up scans. Everyone will have slightly different workflows... and there are probably some very in-depth Imagemagick commands that people have come up with to do what you want.

ScanTailor is probably the easiest way to do a lot of this, but it does "recreate" the images/fonts/text, instead of just taking your image and doing basic cropping/centering.

1611mac · 12-05-2013, 08:02 AM

Ran my 244 pages of first book through the Mac version of ScanTailor last night. Worked perfect and did exactly what I wanted. Nice!

I'll absolutely spend some time at DIY Bookscanner. I've been so happy with my "normal" workflow (mentioned in OP) that I've not been looking for other ideas.

I will mention a nice little app for OSX that handled file re-naming. It's NameMangler and it allows you tot automatically rename batches of files making it easy to use batch ADF scanning without fancy "front/back" duplex software. (I don't like the ADF "faux duplex" options some software provides as if you get a misfeed or have a page scan issue the whole sequence gets messed up.)

12-04-2013, 12:12 PM	#1
1611mac eWanderer Posts: 523 Karma: 1441998 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: NC, USA Device: iMac,iPad3,iPhone5-Kindle Fire,Touch,PaperWhite	Suggestions? Scan foreign language books & make non-searchable pdf I have fast and perfect way of converting paper books in English to epub/mobi using a scanner with an ADF, Abbyy Finereader, Calibre (conversion), etc. I now need to scan some foreign language books (Nepali, German, etc) and I want to save them as simple Non-Searchable pdfs. (basically scanned images in a pdf). I do not want to OCR them. The problem I have is that when I use my ADF the page images are not always well centered and straight. Any suggestions? I have a Mac running both OSX and Windows (ABBYY FineReader). I can scan with any number of scan utilities (Apple Image Capture for example) or scan in FineReader. I know how to convert tiff to pdf, assemble pdfs, crop, etc in Acrobat Pro. As I said, I easily make OCR'd epubs and mobi's. But what I can't figure out is how to simply "center and straighten" a page image somewhat automatically without having to manually rotate and "jog" hundreds of image pages in software. I have a book scanner arriving today (Plustekk OpticBook 3800 RT) that will help yield consistent scans (image placement) but I really hate to have to scan hundreds of pages one by one (without an ADF). Again, any suggestions? .

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12-04-2013, 02:58 PM	#2
Toxaris Wizard Posts: 4,520 Karma: 121692313 Join Date: Oct 2009 Location: Heemskerk, NL Device: PRS-T1, Kobo Touch, Kobo Aura	You can run your scans through scantailor to make fix them. That should take care of the straightning and centering.

12-05-2013, 01:33 AM	#4
Tex2002ans Wizard Posts: 2,306 Karma: 13057279 Join Date: Jul 2012 Device: Kobo Forma, Nook	You should visit the treasure trove over at the DIY Bookscanner forums: http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/ There is a ton of tutorials/information over there on what people do to fix up scans. Everyone will have slightly different workflows... and there are probably some very in-depth Imagemagick commands that people have come up with to do what you want. ScanTailor is probably the easiest way to do a lot of this, but it does "recreate" the images/fonts/text, instead of just taking your image and doing basic cropping/centering.

12-05-2013, 08:02 AM	#5
1611mac eWanderer Posts: 523 Karma: 1441998 Join Date: Jul 2010 Location: NC, USA Device: iMac,iPad3,iPhone5-Kindle Fire,Touch,PaperWhite	Ran my 244 pages of first book through the Mac version of ScanTailor last night. Worked perfect and did exactly what I wanted. Nice! I'll absolutely spend some time at DIY Bookscanner. I've been so happy with my "normal" workflow (mentioned in OP) that I've not been looking for other ideas. I will mention a nice little app for OSX that handled file re-naming. It's NameMangler and it allows you tot automatically rename batches of files making it easy to use batch ADF scanning without fancy "front/back" duplex software. (I don't like the ADF "faux duplex" options some software provides as if you get a misfeed or have a page scan issue the whole sequence gets messed up.)