Digitizing paper documents? - Macintosh Garden

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2014, August 12 - 9:48pm

JonathanNemo

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Joined: 2014 Mar 1

Digitizing paper documents?

Hello everyone.

I've secured an until-recently shrinkwrapped copy of Bright Star Technologies' HyperAnimator 1.5.2, with all the documents, manuals, notes, and product catalogs intact.

Before I upload the two disks that came in this box as DiskCopy 4.2 images, I've noticed in several of the entries in this site, there's PDF documentation that comes in the archive with the disk. I'm curious if anybody knows what would be the best way of digitizing and uploading all of the hard copy. I'd really like to keep it together.

I am in the Bay Area. South bay, though I'd be happy to make a day trip up as far as up north just to get all these things digitized.

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2014, August 12 - 11:57pm

Gary

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Joined: 2011 Jul 21

I've successfully used Omnipage (OCR Software) available here on the Garden to digitize hardcopy content scanned on my UMAX scanner.

It requires a scanned resolution of 300 DPI to get a decent translation from pixels to words.

Gary

2014, August 13 - 2:13am

MikeTomTom

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Joined: 2009 Dec 7

"I've noticed in several of the entries in this site, there's PDF documentation that comes in the archive with the disk."

Several of the games uploads with included PDF scans of their manuals were done by the member "MCP". He would scan the manuals using an Adobe document scanner plug-in, "Acrobat 5.0 Image Conversion Plugin for Macintosh" (perhaps this plugin was for Photoshop - not sure).

His manual scans were not OCR'd, they were simply low-rez bitmap scans of each page, most suited for on-screen viewing, not for print.

I think that the majority of PDF's scanned by members and upped to the Garden are also bitmap (jpeg, tiff, png, etc) scans of whole pages including text & graphics and collated to PDF.

A few of the manuals that I've scanned & uploaded, use a combo of bitmap scans for the images in their pages and OCR scans for the body text (the Interleaf Publisher's Manual DL, springs to mind). The results were excellent but very time consuming to prepare, as they required OCR scanning (with manual correction of OCR typo's) and page layout tweaking in QuarkXpress before using Acrobat Distiller for the final PDF output.

Non-OCR scanning to bitmap and collating to PDF is probably the easiest and least time consuming method for manual preservation.

2014, August 13 - 2:31am

mrdav

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Joined: 2011 Dec 3

For making PDFs of manuals, I use a scanner for which there is a plug-in to PhotoShop Elements. I scan at 300 dpi. In my case I have to process the pdf with Acrobat Pro to make it Acrobat 4 compatible so it is readable on old Macs

2014, August 13 - 4:42am

IIGS_User

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Joined: 2009 Apr 8

I'm also in luck to own Acrobat Pro, using the Text Recognizing functionality to decrease the document size. And, as Mrdav wrote, Acrobat Pro offers the downwards compatibility option.

Even on second hard market, this application costs 200 eggs, but it is worth for those who can effort it.

I've noticed in several of the entries in this site, there's PDF documentation that comes in the archive with the disk.

Me, would like to see this in the separate Manual field instead of.

2014, August 13 - 6:23am

(Reply to #5) #6

MikeTomTom

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Joined: 2009 Dec 7

as Mrdav wrote, Acrobat Pro offers the downwards compatibility option.

And all full versions of Acrobat from 1 to 5 are here at the Garden, with no backwards compatibility to worry about

My all-time favorite Acrobat version is 4.05

2014, August 13 - 6:36am

(Reply to #6) #7

IIGS_User

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Joined: 2009 Apr 8

Me, I'm working with Acrobat Pro 8, currently.

Digitizing manuals for MG is the main reason I use this application.

2014, August 15 - 4:31am

JonathanNemo

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Joined: 2014 Mar 1

Thank you all for the suggestions. I really, really do appreciate it. Very enlightening.

At the end of the day, I opted to go through a slightly convoluted process involving assembling a PostScript document with pages scanned in as TIFF files at 300 dpi, then feeding each one into Acrobat Distiller 3.0 for Acrobat 2 compatibility and JPEG compression. No OCR yet, I was more concerned in getting the pages scanned in and preserved quickly.

I could probably overcome the PostScript step if the Acrobat 3.0 download on this site had a plugin called Acrobat Capture, which the documentation claims can be found on the CD-ROM. I can't find Acrobat Capture as an option to install in the Mac Garden archive, though.

Capture is in the Acrobat 4.0 CD, too. Since I don't have any PPC Macs anymore, I could set up SheepShaver and use that instead.

2014, August 16 - 12:01am

(Reply to #8) #9

MikeTomTom

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Joined: 2009 Dec 7

From the "ReadMe-Exchange" installation SimpleText doc in Acrobat 3.0:

Acrobat Capture, Import Image, and Scan Plug-ins

"The Acrobat Capture, Scan, and Import plug-ins were not available for the initial release of Adobe Acrobat 3.0 for Macintosh. All registered users will automatically receive a free update of Acrobat 3.0 for Macintosh that includes the Capture and Scan plug-in when they are available."

I haven't located a DL for these plug-ins, to date, if they exist.

I haven't used Acrobat Capture in 3 or 4 and while Distiller 4.0 works well if running on SheepShaver, I cannot vouch for scanning via SheepShaver. Would that even be possible? Besides, I find SheepShaver to be too unstable and crash prone for heavy duty tasks.