ok, business folks, heads up for this question please.
My hubs runs his own business and does a lot of subcontracted investigative type work (think lawyer'ie type docs that he can't let just anyone see). Anyway, he needs to scan about 50 sheets of this legal data so that it ends up in a searchable PDF format. (absolutely has to be searchable and in PDF format). So, the question is, what software do we use/buy, etc? or do we send this to someone else to do (Kinko's maybe)? we're in the US BTW, if that helps.
I've used Adobe Elements in the past, a very very very old version - but never scanned anything into it - and, once we got Win 7 it was no was no longer compatible, so I can't test it. If Adobe Elements would work, that would be great. If we have to get AI, that's too expensive. Do we have to get a special scanner? He has one of those 3 in one printer/fax/scanner. We don't have scanner software, so how does that work - do we need special software for the scanner? The printer is an HP Photosmart Plus B210 series. Do we load up some Adobe software into the scanner, I haven't done business stuff in several yrs so a bit clueless.
anyone ever done this before, it can't be that hard, right?
p.s. If you don't want to answer here, feel free to PM me.
thanks in advance, for even reading this far.
dee

I've been using "AABBYY Finereader" for about ten years... pretty good OCR. I bought it directly, before it was bundled with some scanners.

Hi

A free OCR (Optical Character Recognition) program can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/
This program is installed on your own computer.

If you trust your "sensitive" documents to go on the web ( I would not!) you can also use google docs which uses the same OCR "engine".

Good Luck

RGDS
Ragnar

wow, good info, thx to all who replied! I was not thinking OCR at all!
His 3 in 1 does not come with any scanning software, which surprised me. So we have to figure out what software to get for scanning too. I was hoping to find one program that allows the document to be scanned and searchable but doubt that exists. I can't visualize how OCR works (though I've heard of it), have been an end user of OCR data. For some reason I was thinking you had to use Adobe software for it to end up as a searchable PDF. I'm off to look at you'alls links above.
again, thanks so much!

thanks for that addl info PT!
I did hunt down the online manuf manual and it does not mention the need for any software, so maybe it's already in there and my hubs just doesn't realize it. We use Word, so that ought to work.
What I haven't figured out - the hubs can only do a one page scan at a time, his scanner does not have a feeder, it's just a 'lift the lid up' type of thing, so, if he's got 50 sheets of data to scan, is there a way to combine them into one document, or is this going to end up as 50 attachments? wow, 50 attachments would be a bad thing! If that's the case I envision a new scanner in our future, lol.
thanks again!
dee

I enjoy using the free tools the PDFill offers for virtual printer and PDF management (split pages, combine, watermark, secure, etc.). http://www.pdfill.com/pdf_tools_free.html

The OCR software should offer scanning of multiple pages as one document, but the above freeware can handle the page collation as well.

HTH,

TD

ok, thanks!

tylerdurden wrote:I've been using "AABBYY Finereader" for about ten years... pretty good OCR. I bought it directly, before it was bundled with some scanners.

Yup, i also like that one, quite easy to work with and 90% accurate?
The question is only a little bit unclear. If you scan a document,your PDF contains images, a regular PDF contains text, layout and probably pictures.
Just use your OCR tool from your scanner or use open-source based OCR tools like http://www.pdftoword.pro.
Note that they are all not 100% accurate but i think in your case just text extraction in case of OCR is the way to go.

Hope this helps ^^

for search some text in pdf, I think almost all pdf software have that capability, even pdf feature at Google Chrome.