friend needs help

I want to scan magazine articles (combination of photos and text)

[roscoepico]

Anyone here understand what he's trying to accomplish?

I want to scan magazine articles (combination of photos and text) and
convert them to pdf form. I don't want to scan the article as a graphic file
and convert the whole page into pdf. It simply makes too large a pdf file.

I'd like an application that takes a magazine article, converts text image
into a text data, converts the images into image data and creates a pdf. I
can do this the hard way: I can use an OCR program (omnipage) to convert the
text image into text data and then scan the photos one-by-one (photoshop)
into graphics files (jpeg, tiff, etc.) and then import all this into a page
layout program (quark) and then convert (distill) the file to pdf. That,
however, is a lot of work.

Isn't there some program that does this automatically?

[rogerd]

Doesn't Omnipage now offer "direct to pdf" conversion in the latest edition? I'm not sure, but that would certainly be the way to go if you aren't to fussy about having the graphics absolutely perfect.

I don't suppose I need to point out copyright cautions...

[mivox]

If there is a program that does it automatically, I definitely want to know about it... We've got tons of scanned-from-paper product manuals on our website that could definitely stand to lose a few K.

[bill]

...a little late here but...
Adobe Acrobat Capture will do what you ask...includes OCR capability & image tools and will make the PDF files for you. I've used this with an autofeed scanner to make PDF catalogs with decent results.

[kingkelly]

It says Adobe Acrobat Capture is for Win NT/2000, and theres a cruddy version if you dont have it. If i have XP, will the NT version still work? Also, theres an Adobe Paper Capture plug-in, i dont know if that does the same trick.

[bill]

Capture was a pretty heavy duty app in its day...It would take TIFF, PCX, BMP or PDF images and then output PDF, HTML, ASCII, RTF, WOrd or WordPerfect format. The OCR capability and other functions far outstripped the Capture plug-in for Acrobat.

I don't know whether it will work on XP.