Creating PDFs on the cheap

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Larry Peterson

Larry Peterson

SPFG, Supreme Picture Framing God
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I am going to be scanning in some equipment manuals (Chronomat to start) and posting them on my site as discussed here.

Without spending any money, I would like some advice on the best way to do this. I have a CanoScan 8800F with has a scan to PDF mode. If nothing else is available, that would be plan 'B'. It doesn't allow any editing, TOC, or other things that might be nice.

Somewhere I think I have an ancient licensed copy of Acrobat (6.0 I think) and I have a licensed copy of Photoshop CS4 (although I don't believe it will be of any help).

Do I have any other options? One of the things I don't like and CanoScan is that I have to get it right the first time. If I have 30 pages to scan and I mess up page 29, then I have start from scratch.
 
The free OPENOFFICE word processing program can also export to PDF. That's what I used to make the LS Tips and Tricks booklet/PDF.

Keep in mind that scans are PICTURES, not editable text. (however, they can be run through OCR software to get text, at about 95% accuracy)

There may also be copyright concerns to consider, depending what you are scanning.

Mike
 
Mike Labbe @ GTP said:
There may also be copyright concerns to consider, depending what you are scanning.Mike
Click to expand...

The only things I will probably scan is for obsolete and discontinued equipment that doesn't have a PDF available online. Fletcher, ITW and Logan all appear to have online manuals.

What I probably will be scanning are manuals for things like Chronomat and Pistorius if I can't find any online manuals. For these out-of-business companies, there shouldn't be any copyright concerns as this is a public service benefiting their former customers.

I can't image any of these out-of-business companies complaining about this. If they do, then I will take them down. Since they abandoned their customers and non longer provide support, then the customers have a right to materials from any source to support their equipment.

But then again, who knows.
 
Mike Labbe @ GTP said:
Keep in mind that scans are PICTURES, not editable text. (however, they can be run through OCR software to get text, at about 95% accuracy)
Click to expand...

I think my biggest need is to be able to add/delete whole pages without rescanning an entire document.
 
On a Mac, any document can be saved as a PDF. It is a choice available as a button in the lower left of any Print dialog box.
:cool: Rick
 
If you have Office 2010, there is a free add on available from Microsoft that allows documents to be saved as pdf.
You could add the scanned 'picture' to Word and save it as a pdf.


There are some online 'convert to pdf' sites too. Here are two:
http://www.freepdfconvert.com/
http://www.pdfonline.com/
 
Photoshop has limited PDF support, so you could use it for single image PDFs, that's about it. Probably already know that. :icon19:

I've used Nitro's PDF Hammer in the past & it worked well. It's a free web-based PDF editor. Might check it out: http://www.nitropdf.com/free/hammer/index.htm

Oh, yeah. I had forgotten this but Adobe has a free PDF converter here: https://createpdf.acrobat.com/welcome.html; this may be a better choice than Nitro, which appears to be offline.
 
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Larry, if you have Acrobat v6, that's probably what I'd use. It will be quick and easy to do what you want. The newer versions don't (as far as I recall) add any features that you would miss out on for a simple create from scan issue. It also will do OCR (if you want it to), as well as straighten the image, optimize it, etc. You can also do TOC, rearrange/add/delete pages etc, etc.

Just like a mechanical tool, I'd rather use an older well built one than a new fancy one that "can" do what you want.
 
Larry Peterson said:
Somewhere I think I have an ancient licensed copy of Acrobat (6.0 I think) and I have a licensed copy of Photoshop CS4 (although I don't believe it will be of any help).
Click to expand...

You can easily do a multi page PDF using Photoshop. It's under FILE-AUTOMATE-PDF PRESENTATION. Check the Multi Page Document under output options. Select the images you want to use, put them in the order you want by dragging them into place. Click Save.
 
I know what you mean about having to start over. I have done a bit of scanning with a document feeder, and it will sometimes mess up.

I use Paperport (it came with an older scanner, and is a document file organizer software) to stack and unstack my pages. If I have had an error, then I just rescan the page, and insert it into the stack. Not the slickest solution, but it works.
 
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