[Scanner-Build] - Ghetto Scan - out of pocket expense < $2

[ChrisG]

Scabbed this together to see the process before I went on to building something more substantial. The only thing I had to buy was a picture frame from the dollar store for the glass.
I scanned a 850 page text book in under 2 hours, in another 2 hours I had a fully searchable PDF file.



Here was my workflow:
1)I used a Canon XTi with DSLR Remote Pro to take the pictures to my laptop. I like the display so I can see if any adjustments need to be made to the book/camera during scanning
2)Total Commander to rename left and right photos into a sequential order for processing
3) Scan Tailor to process into tiffs
4) Acrobat with ClearScan for OCR
5) The final book is less than 20MB

Here is a sample shot

[daniel_reetz]

Beautifully done - and thanks for the sample shot! One minor improvement, at no cost -- make your shutter speed a bit longer (go from, say, 1/60 to 1/30) and you'll get brighter images.

Thanks for sharing this! I think we need a lot more of this kind of thing to show people it doesn't need to be complicated to be great.

[daniel_reetz]

Also, if you have time, a screenshot of the final output you got would really drive the point home.

[ChrisG]

Thanks for the hint, I'm going to try another book today.

Whats the best way to handle lines and graphs (like at the top of the page)? These are law books so there are very few non-text objects

Final Product

[WallyJ]

Depending on your OCR software, you can identify sections of your pages as text or images. Anything you don't want turned into text, you can leave as an image.

I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with Acrobat with Clearscan.

Good luck. I will have my build page up soon!