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Topic: I've got a major project with problems. Help !
Conf: (P-PDF) Paper to PDF, Msg: 31629
From: meswartz
Date: 12/15/2001 07:06 AM
As many others have previously pointed out in this forum, the OCR capabilities of the full Acrobat product are weak at best. You and your client may best be served by considering the following plan:
1) Perform an OCR operation on all of those scanned images using a more-capable OCR tool, such as FineReader Pro. At $100 (US) per copy, it is a bargain and will save you a lot of time and aggravation. Save the results as PDF with "text behind image". (This is "PDF Searchable Image" in Adobe terminology.) You may need to convert those .MAX files to .TIF first. Don't send out files with a non-universal file format or extension! If you have to tell US what .MAX means, what will the readers do? This is exactly the kind of problem that the PDF format solves so well. Conversion those scans into PDF is the very largest favor you can do for the books's readers.
2) Build a full-text-search database using the Catalog application that comes with the full Acrobat product.
3) Put the catalog onto the CD-ROM along with the catalog data. Put a copy of the "Acrobat Reader with Search" on the CD-ROM also, and save the book's purchasers the trouble.
4) Build a front end to this collection that is PDF based, rather than HTML based. This -can- be done very simply by authoring it in (say) Microsoft Word or your favorite document authoring tool, converting that document to PDF using Distiller (not PDFwriter), then using Acrobat to add document links to the front-end PDF. Done.
