We each have our own interest, the things that really make us love our Mac's. I doubt what I mention will interest few but I would be remiss if I didn't send your way.
I need to be able to search PDF files, bunches of them. I bought a good business scanner, does a wonderful job of chewing up the pages and I had scanned in at least 10 Forbes magazines when I came to my senses and realized I couldn't search on them. How dumb. They had not been scanned with an OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software. I began searching and found some options but was that the best idea? Somehow I stumbled onto Adobe's Acrobat XI Pro. and downloaded the trial. This is the most awesome piece of software for what I need, and it also allowed me to take the previous scans and run them through the OCR portion of Acrobat and make them usable so all that time and effort was not wasted. So many features that other PDF software will do like, PDF Pen Pro, but you also get the OCR!!! Once started you indicate you want to create a PDF from a scanned document, it opens your scanners (I use three for different operations) and choose the one you want, it launches Epson Scan software and you make your adjustments inside the Epson software for what you want, single sided, double, dpi, and all the adjustments offered. Then hit scan. Adobe takes over and begins the scan. Once it's done it quits the Epson program and launches the document. Of course it goes much slower as it's doing the OCR work as it scans but shortly another Forbes is complete. Sometimes, not always, the front cover is upside down, but hit the rotate button and it's corrected. I go through and remove all the advertisements and then save the file. I have done word searches on each magazine, finds them every time. I have also used Spotlight to attempt various searches and it now finds the wording inside any of the magazines where it will appear. I also had a doctors form to be filled out so I scanned and completed it inside Acrobat, then printed the copy I have to take with me. I had one previous scan that I didn't remember to add the pages that were smaller so I was going to have to merge the two, Acrobat was a breeze. I am thrilled beyond belief, as I have mentioned before I am going to use Sonar to index the PDF's and then create extensive and savable searches but without the software to create the OCR I was up the creek. Just in case someone has a need similar to mine I can certainly recommend this setup. John _______________________________________________ MacGroup mailing list [email protected] http://www.math.louisville.edu/mailman/listinfo/macgroup
