Brand new to making an ebook and need help

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Morphinater
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 08:53
E-book readers owned: Nook
Number of books owned: 2000
Country: USA

Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Morphinater »

Ok so I am a noob here and already have problems. I purchased a Vupoint handheld scanner. I have scanned a whole book at 900 dpi in pdf format.(the scanner can do both Jpeg and PDF) Looking at the pages they look good. Very clear text and stuff, but its in an image form not text form. SO i run the adobe OCR tool and it seems to output in a wierd font that almost looks like handwriting and some of the text is sent to a second page. I then tried to run it through Calibre and convert to epub(I have a nook) and its just alot of gibberish and I also tried Wondershare OCR PRO a trial version which is normally like 80 bucks. ALso alot of gibberish. I tried it scanning a couple pages at 300 dpi too to see if the text was too fine and no luck there either. Please help I have spent alot of hours of frustration so far.
snaguy
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Joined: 14 Mar 2011, 04:28
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Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by snaguy »

First it is alway good to test a workflow with several pages before charging in and scanning a whole book.

Are you using a Mac or PC?

What version Acrobat?

And can you post a sample scan.
Morphinater
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 08:53
E-book readers owned: Nook
Number of books owned: 2000
Country: USA

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Morphinater »

Ok yeah I didn't realize I couldn't just scan and stick into my nook so I just kept checking to make sure they were legible. So yeah. Ok I am using a PC with Windows 7 and I use Adobe CS 4 so Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro. And here is my sample
Attachments
IMAG0027.PDF
(1.56 MiB) Downloaded 471 times
snaguy
Posts: 54
Joined: 14 Mar 2011, 04:28
E-book readers owned: iPad
Number of books owned: 0

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by snaguy »

Ok I am assuming you have the PDS-ST415-VPS Vupoint handheld scanner. The other models either don't scan 900dpi or have Abbyy OCR software bundled.

OCR does not benefit from scanning at a higher dpi. 300dpi is what most suggest.

From your sample, I see that it needs cropping and rotating. If you are trying to OCR with Acrobat without the text in the correct orientation, that may be the cause of your problem.

You may need to use a different workflow, your image could benefit being converted to black and white, and the brightness, contrast adjusted.

Is the sample unaltered? Have you made any changes since transferring from the Vupoint?
Morphinater
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 08:53
E-book readers owned: Nook
Number of books owned: 2000
Country: USA

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Morphinater »

that image is just straight from the scanner. I do rotate it before I ocr. I think I am scanning in black and white as well. My scanner is the VuPoint Solutions PDS-ST441-VP Magic Wand. I did scan at 900 dpi so would be best to back it off to 300? My scanner can do JPEG and PDF scans. Is it better to do JPEG format?
snaguy
Posts: 54
Joined: 14 Mar 2011, 04:28
E-book readers owned: iPad
Number of books owned: 0

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by snaguy »

That model should have Abbyy OCR bundled with the scanner. Before trying a jpg workflow I would try Abbyy with the PDF scans.
Vidar
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Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Vidar »

After extracting a jpg from the pdf and rotating, and cropping a little I end up with a 459x758 (0.35MB) file and that's way way to small for OCR. It is still possible to obtain a half-decent result from such a small picture, but that means you have to open it in a photo editor, enlarge it 500% and run Unsharp Mask with a very large radius.
snaguy
Posts: 54
Joined: 14 Mar 2011, 04:28
E-book readers owned: iPad
Number of books owned: 0

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by snaguy »

I did not mean a jpg extracted from the PDF but a jpg from the scanner.

Did you find out if you have Abbyy on the disc supplied?
Morphinater
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 08:53
E-book readers owned: Nook
Number of books owned: 2000
Country: USA

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Morphinater »

It has it packaged but it seems to just be a converter not an OCR tool. It just pops up a tool to convert to PDF/Word/Excel/other Formats......
Morphinater
Posts: 7
Joined: 01 Nov 2012, 08:53
E-book readers owned: Nook
Number of books owned: 2000
Country: USA

Re: Brand new to making an ebook and need help

Post by Morphinater »

Ok well ignore the last post I figured out how to OCR but not from PDF in the scanner but from JPEG and then it gets converted to PDF and OCR'd at the same time but it is not converting well at all. It looks good but when I put it in calibre and change to epub it looks like an image on the nook still. And if I just put the PDF into the Nook then it is Gibberish. Any suggestions? Here is a sample of what it outputted
Attachments
OCR Showdown Test Page.pdf
(265.39 KiB) Downloaded 453 times
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