Sorry about that previous post to the list. If it went out, it was intended only for Pat. <blush> But having interrupted you, let me ask a question. I have some documents I am going to be scanning. Mostly they will fall into two categories: 1) Things that are mostly schematics. 2) Things with a large text component that I might want to try to OCR. Questions: a) What resolution should I use for these two things? b) What OCR software do you recommend when I am scanning a book that has to be scanned 1 page at a time. I started with the Brainiacs book from Edmund C. Berkeley and every page is a separate tiff file. Now this book has very little text, so I could just tar them or zip them, but if I had one with lots of text, how can I get all these tiff files back into one document when I OCR it without a bunch of cutting ans pasting? TIA, Gil

I use Corel OCR-Trace v8, from 1998, nearly on topic. It really wants to use 300dpi 1 level, and I typically save as 300dpi 8bit for posterity, then downcast to 1bit before the OCR. Scanning at 2400 bpi seems too much like microscopy to be practical <g>. John A.

In message <20050921173653.4bd01ba4.jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote: IrfanView's "Enhance Colours" tool is very handy for converting greyscale images to B&W. Set the contrast to maximum (127), then tweak the brightness until you get something resembling readable text. Remember the settings, then use them for the rest of the scans. Freely available from <http://www.irfanview.com/> (freeware, no source code, Windows only). I used to use ImageMagick when scanning books - I loaded the image into IrfanView to find out where the "shadow" started (on both odd and even pages). Next I used IM to crop them, then convert to B&W (100% contrast, play with the brightness). Finally I used Irfanview to convert the images into G4-compressed TIFFs. I always kept the cropped (and uncropped) 8-bit greyscale images though - just in case the extra quality was required at some point. <http://www.imagemagick.org/> - open source, runs on basically anything with a C compiler. Another hint: Tumble is very handy for converting TIFFs into PDFs. <http://tumble.brouhaha.com/> - only officially works on Linux, but I've had it running on Windows too after compiling it with Mingw32. Hasn't been updated for nearly two years, but still very handy when used in conjunction with Imagemagick. Later. -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at philpem.me.uk | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook For sale: Politician's brain. Never used.