Hi--
I've been developing a workflow to digitize books. I typically take photos of the pages of the books and then process them in Aperture (soon, photos or Lr, I guess...) to make them essentially black text on a purely white background. I export them at a reduced size and convert them to PDFs and string them together in one file to make an e-book.
I want to smooth out the process and have the text recognized via OCR and embedded in the PDF so the files are searchable, and I also want to produce smaller file sizes overall. (Typically, a book will be 1-200MB, which while not huge, is still a strain on the current top of the line 15" rMBP to render while reading alongside a bunch of other documents for my work.
I'm thinking of using either ABBYY Finereader or Adobe Acrobat Pro to get the text OCR'd and hopefully the file sizes reduced.
Anyone have any recommendations for improving this process? Experience with these apps?
I have a feeling Acrobat will be better for getting the file size down as Adobe sort of owns the PDF. When I tried their trial, though, the UI did not seem optimized for macs, let alone retina macs. Are they due for a new version soon?
Any experiences/advice with this sort of workflow would be appreciated!
I've been developing a workflow to digitize books. I typically take photos of the pages of the books and then process them in Aperture (soon, photos or Lr, I guess...) to make them essentially black text on a purely white background. I export them at a reduced size and convert them to PDFs and string them together in one file to make an e-book.
I want to smooth out the process and have the text recognized via OCR and embedded in the PDF so the files are searchable, and I also want to produce smaller file sizes overall. (Typically, a book will be 1-200MB, which while not huge, is still a strain on the current top of the line 15" rMBP to render while reading alongside a bunch of other documents for my work.
I'm thinking of using either ABBYY Finereader or Adobe Acrobat Pro to get the text OCR'd and hopefully the file sizes reduced.
Anyone have any recommendations for improving this process? Experience with these apps?
I have a feeling Acrobat will be better for getting the file size down as Adobe sort of owns the PDF. When I tried their trial, though, the UI did not seem optimized for macs, let alone retina macs. Are they due for a new version soon?
Any experiences/advice with this sort of workflow would be appreciated!