[DoraExplorer]

I would like to find out about scanning documents, and find out exactly what is possible and what is not. I hope someone can help.

I teach first grade and have hundreds of worksheets and forms. I would like to put all of those worksheets and forms on my computer. I could find them easier, they wouldn't get old and wrinkled, and I wouldn't accidently use the last master copy!

Can I do it? What would I need? I have a G3 iBook at school and a G4 eMac at home. I've read the description of OmniPage Pro X and Readiris Pro 9 at the Apple Store online. It sounds wonderful, but a little hard to believe (and OnmiPage Pro is completely out of my price range).

Could I really scan math worksheets (for example) that have little illustrations on them? Could I just save them as PDFs and print them out when I need them? And could I really edit them easily? It all just sounds too wonderful to be true.

Thanks for any help

[ourisman]

Check the CD-ROM that came with your scanner. There could very well be OCR software that came bundled with your system... probably low-end, but still capable of doing the job.

[Sarc]

I think Image Capture (/Applications/Utilities) has OCR capabilities built-in ... I could be wrong though.

[Mithras]

Adobe Acrobat Professional is expensive but does exactly what you want.

[DoraExplorer]

Originally posted by Mithras:
Adobe Acrobat Professional is expensive but does exactly what you want.

Thank you all for your help. I don't even have a scanner yet, so that may be part of my confusion. I don't want to buy a scanner or put out a lot of money unless I know that it can do exactly what I want.

Mithras, as a teacher I can get Acrobat Professional at a deep discount. I went to their website, and I see that it does a lot of things. But the part I don't understand is this: They only talk about manipulating computer-created documents. But what if I scan the document? Is it saved as a PDF there? Or do I just open the scanned document with Acrobat Professional?

Or does the scanned document actually have to be opened with Office or Appleworks and then saved as a PDF? In that case, I don't think Microsoft Word could render a first grade worksheet with kiddie fonts and graphics on it. The Appleworks drawing program might, I guess. Oh, well, you can see that I'm a little confused.

[midwinter]

If I'm reading you correctly, I don't think you need any OCR software. If all you want to do is scan and archive these worksheets, all you need to do is scan them and save as a PDF. I picked up a cheapie Canon Lide 30 for about $70 at Staples, and it works just fine (although installing the software is terribly confusing) for this kind of thing.

Anyway. Like I said, unless you need to *edit* the documents after they've been scanned, you shouldn't need anything beyond whatever scanning software comes with your scanner.

Cheers
Scott

Edit: Missed that last little bit about editing the files. To do that, you *will* nee OCR software. My last experience with it (many moons ago) was that it was hit or miss. I'm sure it's better now.

[bergy]

Whatever you do don't buy a Canon scanner. The interface (Cano Scan Toolbox) is extremely confusing and irritating to use. I have had 2 Canons, and will never buy another. I am very happy with my Epson photo 1260 and its software.

[Mithras]

Originally posted by DoraExplorer:
Mithras, as a teacher I can get Acrobat Professional at a deep discount. I went to their website, and I see that it does a lot of things. But the part I don't understand is this: They only talk about manipulating computer-created documents. But what if I scan the document? Is it saved as a PDF there? Or do I just open the scanned document with Acrobat Professional?

Acrobat permits you to edit the PDFs directly. It works like this:
1. Scan the documents (using whatever software you want -- what comes with your scanner, or a Photoshop plugin, etc.) Save the pages temporarily as a TIFF.
2. In Acrobat, you open the page.
3. Then you do an OCR capture.
You can choose two styles:
a) it keeps the exact image that you scanned, and just puts a layer of text underneath the image of the page. This is mostly handy if you want to preserve the original document, but want to be able to search the content.
b) it recognizes the text, rerenders it with whatever font you have that matches most closely, and recognizes which sections seem to be pictures (which it keeps intact).

b) is probably what you want. If you want to edit things, you can do small-scale changes right in Acrobat (changing names, dates, etc.) But Acrobat is not a word processor, and PDF is not a word processing format -- for example, you can't really reflow text across pages very easily.

At the worst, if you wanted to do bigger changes, you could copy out the images, and copy the OCR'd text, and re-layout the page in Word or whatever.

Here's an example document I had lying around -- I did some small edits: here

[DoraExplorer]

Thanks to everyone for your help. I think I understand it enough now to make a decision. I'll go ahead and get a scanner and then get the Acrobat Professional. I hope it works!

[MikeD]

I tried this and for some reason, I got an error that read, "Acrobat ran into the following problem with the Paper Capture recognition server:
Unable to process the page because the Paper Capture recognition server unexpectedly terminated."

Any ideas?

[CharlesS]

Originally posted by MikeD:
I tried this and for some reason, I got an error that read, "Acrobat ran into the following problem with the Paper Capture recognition server:
Unable to process the page because the Paper Capture recognition server unexpectedly terminated."

Any ideas?

Yes, I tried this a few days ago and got the same thing. The odd thing was, a few minutes later it worked fine. Could be a network problem (connecting to server?), or it could be because I logged out and back in - not sure.

Anyone know what this error means and why it appears? Is the "server" mentioned here something which is running on the local machine, or is it something that needs to be connected to over the network?