[PSUBS-MAILIST] Busby Scan

[Jari Siikarla <jari.siikarla@vertex.fi>]

Hi

I just want to make some thing clear to everybody.
(So no real contribution to the matter here :(

Sliced Busby's is a good news.
With that you can scan the whole bunch automatically
(propably in several pathes, but still less work than scanning
700+ pages by hand)
Single or double sided scanner doesn't matter as long as you save
pages in separate files.

There are PDF's and PDF. You can have the _picture_ of tha page
inside PDF (jpg-compressed) or you can have the text as text and
pictures as pictures. Then you can use "find", "create indexes", etc.
functions on the text  (And the resulting PDF is LOT smaller)

To get scanned picture (of the page) to text you need to use
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software (or type it by hand ;).

When scanning, use decent resolution (300dpi in good if the contrast
on the scan is good. Higher resolution is better, but eats up you HD fast).
Save the file in lossless imageformat (you can always ZIP it if it is not
compressed format (GIF for one uses ZIP algorithm)).
The JPG is good to store pictures that are viewed by human eyes as
it loses info that eye can't see, but software will be affected by this
missing info. (And JPG is not good compression method on B/W
text pages. Excellent on grayscale or colour pictures though).

The best way I can see is having the scanner and OCR software
in the same place. They are propably compatible together and
you don't need to transfer all that data around.

JohnM you had access to commercial grade fast scanner&OCR ?
If you can use all you charm to get a competent user to show you
the ropes, that would be the fastest way to do it.
I'll chip in for a bottle of good Cognag for the rope shower ;)
(BTW why does SI has nanoseconds, but no nano minutes or hours ? ;)

Jari