DIY Book Scanner

I hope this is the right area to ask this question....

When I scan a book, often times, especially with school textbooks, it is nice to look at the book in 2 page view with an even numbered page on the left and odd on the right. But if you scan a book with the front cover as page one of the PDF, you end up with the PDF file mixing up the even and odd / left and right views.

My solution so far has been to scan the front and rear covers of the book as the first two pages of the book.

Is there a better way?

I don't use acrobat or acrobat reader, so I'm not sure if this is still valid. I recall there being a "show cover page" option that can be selected after switching to the two page mode. It was somewhere in the view dropdown menu. Toggling that changed the offset. That may or not be true anymore, this was a number of years ago.

On the free software readers, some of them (Okular and Document Viewer) can do either facing page orientations. (they each just call it something different) Okular, for example, changes the offset with a "center first page" option, and Document Viewer selects for two page with odd numbered or even numbered pages on the left.

Format the PDF as you see fit, then make the reader adjust to you. (I prefer front cover first, and back cover last, but that's just me)

ai4px wrote:I hope this is the right area to ask this question....

When I scan a book, often times, especially with school textbooks, it is nice to look at the book in 2 page view with an even numbered page on the left and odd on the right. But if you scan a book with the front cover as page one of the PDF, you end up with the PDF file mixing up the even and odd / left and right views.

My solution so far has been to scan the front and rear covers of the book as the first two pages of the book.

Is there a better way?

You could just insert a blank page into your book. You may notice that some publishers purposely leave a blank page in a book, the reason is to adjust pagination so that new chapters are always oriented on either the right or left page. So you could use the same idea.

You could just create a blank page and keep it handy whenever you need to pad a book to get the desired results. In Adobe Acrobat it is easy to do, don't know about other solutions.

PDF's can be set to display the first page by itself.
In Adobe viewer you can choose "Show cover page in two page view"
In Adobe acrobat you can make the pdf default to that view, by choosing File, Properties, initial view, page layout, "2-up continuous"

Book scan wizard will automatically show the cover by itself if the first included page is a right sided page.