Zane H. Healy wrote:
You can use
Adobe Exchange and install the Adobe PDFwriter. All you
do is using your scanning software, place the microfiche onto a scanner
with a blank white heavy stock sheet of paper behind the film, and scan
the film to the pdfwriter and save it. There are some PD versions of
the PDFwriter out on the net as well if you don't want to purchase the
Adobe Exchange package. I have an HP Scanjet and I use its Copier
program and I just tell it to copy my files to an adobe pdfwriter file.
Just what resolution scanner are you using? I'm not aware of any standard
scanner that is high enough resolution to scan Microfiche, and have it be
readable.
Zane
I agree with the above comments about the software. I just scanned two
fiche with an Epson transparency
scanner. The above will probably not work, unless you have the correct
scanner. I have never had
any luck scanning transparencies, or slides with just backing with
white. The normal backing of
a scanner is usually the best white that can be delivered, and my
experience with transparencies is usually
a black blot.
I bought one of the higher end Epson scanners to scan some 4x5
negatives, and several 5 x 7 glass
negatives that my parents had. I figured that even at a ridiculous
cost, it was cheaper than my experiences
with custom photo processing labs overall, and if I scaned them, I could
do whatever I wished then.
I scanned the fiche at 3200bpi real, and was able to just move the
reference box over each image
on the preview page, and scan all the page images. Each one was scanned
at about 1200 x 1500
jpegs in my case, as I didn't go to adobe. I plan to have mine on a web
page soon, and could
send you the url when I get permission to get them online.
I believe the result is as good as I would have gotten if I had scanned
the original documents at
200 dpi in the original. Epson's suite includes an OCR package, and it
worked at > 50% but
not at 100% efficiency. It would take some considerable work to get the
OCR to 100% because
it did not seem to be that good with the typewrite font used, not due to
the quality of the scanning.
the only places I had any problem was where the original fiche didn't
result in an image having
uniform contrast because it would not lay down completely on the
original fiche. This is only
a problem for the OCR software, not for a human reader.
Also, my scanning didnt include any cleanup of the orientation problems
in the original scanning. I
had aligned the fiche very carefully to be square with the bed of the
scanner, but the original transfer
to fiche was not uniform, so there was some rotation of the document
images that could be cleaned
up to make them all square as well.
Jim