PDF trawl

Over the past few weeks, I've been retracing my steps along that all-to-familiar path of How to Improve the Firm's Scanning Facilities. Without a huge spend. However, this time, we've achieved the all-important step of approval: the Powers-that-be have ordained that scanners are required.

So having looked at upgrading the photocopiers^H^H^H^H^H^multi-functional devices (too expensive), setting up HP scanners for the departments (processing is too slow), and converting the TopCall fax scanners (...just right.... but expensive....), I've now started to look at the training side of things.

Worryingly, I'm beginning to be regarded as the Expert on All Things PDF/OCR. Not that I mind being seen as an expert, but I know that I'm not! So I've taken some time today to read up a bit on scanning, PDFs and extracting/repurposing text.

These are the useful things I found:
Planet PDF AcroTip No. 73 - Turning paper into searchable PDFs, using Acrobats Capture plug-in.
Gemini - PDF content extraction tool
AcroTip 21 - How to extract all text from a PDF at once.
Planet PDF Tools List.

Mark Anderson's Adobe Adcrobat v5.0 Toolbar Icons <- this is excellent
and he's got pages on PDF Web Links, and More Acrobat Tips

Vision + Work - Stephan Jaeggi of Prepress-Consulting's white papers on PDF workflows in the printing industry (although they are quite old now, and refer to v4.0):
Basic
Management
Creation
Production

But what I'd really like is basic training-type information, covering the different types of output, and how to make the most of the features, particularly text-searching/extraction, so that we can show the lawyers and secretaries just what they can do with Adobe Reader 5.0.

I should just play around with Adobe Acrobat Reader myself!