Shout out to Roger Pearse on scanning xeroxes

[ficino]

Roger, I too have file drawers full of xeroxes of articles from decades back. I'm glad I stumbled across your blog post about scanning them as pdfs:

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/

I am a techno-illiterate. Do you have a scanner with an automatic feeder? You don't place each Xeroxed sheet on the document glass by hand, do you? Any suggestions about a scanner with a feeder would be welcome.

cheers, ficino

[Peter Kirby]

For what it's worth, I have access to a scanner with automatic feeder...

If you are friends with someone who operates a small business that requires a fancy printer they might let you borrow it for scanning...

[DCHindley]

Roger, I too have file drawers full of xeroxes of articles from decades back. I'm glad I stumbled across your blog post about scanning them as pdfs:

http://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/

I am a techno-illiterate. Do you have a scanner with an automatic feeder? You don't place each Xeroxed sheet on the document glass by hand, do you? Any suggestions about a scanner with a feeder would be welcome.

cheers, ficino

Roger has posted several articles on document scanning on his blog over the years.

Most "All-In-One" type printer-scanner-fax units, which cost as little as US $100, also have automatic document feeders. Generally, they all work reasonably well at feeding individual sheets. There may be a limit on how many it can hold, though. The bigger the scanner the more it will hold in the feeder. Make sure there are no staples and that the sheets are detached from one another (sometimes the staples, even when removed, cause pages to stick together at the perforations. To avoid jams with old dog-eared copies, put them in so the best edges are leading into the scanner, as the OCR (scanning) program can detect page orientation, and still read them fine.

There are a number of free programs out there that will produce scans, usually in PDF format but possibly as TIF (fax-style) images. Don't bother with the ones that can only scan one page at a time, creating a separate file for each page you scan. I shelled out $125 for ABBYY Finreader 11, but it, like many scanning programs, is a bit quirky and hard to set up, as the settings are spread across several pull down and right-click menus, some of which are hard to get to because you have to be performing a specific function to access them.

Even if you set the language recognition to read Greek or Hebrew the results may or may not scan correctly. The Greek it recognizes is, unfortunately, modern Greek, as is the Hebrew. But all that German (umlauts and all) and French (accents galore) stuff scans good. Any images in the source can be preserved. Usually, the program analyses how to read the scanned pages, but it may not do it the way you want it to, so you have the option to change the number and type of recognition areas, page by page, which can be tedious.

I scan old articles all the time. You can even scan bound books, without slicing off the spine, but it is a good idea to determine the scanning area on the glass, especially the center line, so that you align the book so the crease between the pages lies right on the dividing line. The scanner will almost always correctly recognize multiple page documents and separate the pages. If not, scan the page again and make sure the crease between pages is smack in the centerline of the scan area. Tip: Plan on spending a day or two scanning a 300 page book, switching between mundane tasks and scanning.

The options for scanning Greek (with all the accents, not just the three or so in modern Greek) are currently dismal. I do not know how some of the online Greek source texts have been scanned. They may just be manually input, or edited after scanning, by native Greek readers, which I am not. Roger has looked at "gImage reader," which can be trained to read classical/koine Greek, but not without a tremendous amount of work, because there are about 250 Greek letter-accent-breathing combinations (I have them all on a spreadsheet). In the end it may only work with one book font (and we all know there are scores of book fonts for Greek). I am not even sure how to use it, as it assumes you are more technologically advanced than your company's IT person, and the instructions refer to other programs that do not appear to be either free or included in the Zip file with the rest of the stuff.

DCH