An old memoir
 

Evnin' all.
I've got a book/let produced by an uncle of mine about his time as a private soldier in WW1. It was retyped in the late '70s and seems to be on A4 size pages but was clearly done on a manual typewriter in (I think) Courier 14pt. I volunteered to scan it into my PC and turn it into a Word document, but it has turned into a nightmare task. Although the paper seems to be A4 it never seems to be a complete match on the scanner. There are multiple typos that need correcting but they seem to be generated by the scanner, but not all of them! I now have some individual pages scanned in and edited but there are only 375 left to do! I'm not sure if I'll live long enough to see the end. Has anyone any procedural suggestions as to a way of speeding up the process? Spending large sums on a sexy new scanner isn't an option.

Is making it a Word document the best way? Alll the pages I've done so far are one side only. The book itself is moderately fragile and lots of the pages are loose (which does have the benefit of making them easier to get into the scanner). All suggestions will receive due consideration. TIA
The Ancient Mariner

Does it have to be a word document?

If you just want a digital version then you could scan the pages and save them as images and then convert them to a pdf document using something like open office.

I think I would agree that a PDF format would be the easiest, and fully editable, but still a pain scanning wise. There are commercial document scanning services available but at what cost I've no idea.

I'm confused. Are you saying that the software is decoding / encoding the scanned image into a text format? Text recognition in other words.

I guess you haven't got the original pages. It would be a shame if they were scrapped upon transcribing.

I have many of my father's letters to my mother from WWII, I intend to scan them as jpg's and archive on DVD. Rough edges, mud, tea-stains and all.

This is by the way, but I also have a charming little Birthday Book. Many, many ancestors in there. My mother was one of the last when she signed it at age 12 -- born 100 years ago.

The book is hard-back and of course very precious so I didn't want to stress the 'hinge', yet the pages lie flat enough to get a good focus to the spine.

So far so good
 

Thanks for your contributions so far guys. I'll have to read up on how to create a pdf doc.

Loose. I think the typos come from some limitations in my scanner. The type on the pages isn't always very sharp edged and I think it "misreads" what's on the page. Away from that; the original was handwritten in the 1920s after the still very young man was demobbed in late 1919. His parents were gone and he had a sister who in non-PC terms was called "simple", who needed looking after. He trained as a primary school teacher and it wasn't until he was a bit more settled that he had time to put his thoughts on paper. In the '40s he was a headmaster and had access to a typewriter of the sit-up-and-beg type. He then transferred the originals into typed pages. In the '70s his son had them professionally typed again and printed a limited edition (5) for the family and for the Black Watch museum. It's a rivetting read as you follow this 16 year old from Dundee through the trenches in France, through captivity and the 'flu pandemic of 1918, to just walking away from his prison camp as he saw the war ending, back through the retreating Germans to the safety of his own troops. It's a story that I want to make available to MY family and this seems a good way to do it - if only I can crack it. Thanks again.
The Ancient Mariner

Friends gave me a set of "The Complete National Geographic Magazine on CD". It covers from the first issue in 1888 up to the end of the 1990s.

The NGS just scanned all the pages as JPG and let it go at that. The resolution is poor enough that the text is not too easy to read. About three or four CDs cover a decade of the magazine including all the adverts.

A page of text occupies about 56 kilobytes. A double-page color image takes about 150 kilobytes. I would recommend against such severe compression.

seacue

Rossian,
check your PMs

Brian

A couple of years ago i did quite a big job scanning a document and converting into word format.

I found that the software which did the conversion from scan to word (I think it was called textbridge) was very sensitive to some of the scanning parameters.

Experiment a bit. Don't scan in colour, make sure it is black/white, not greyscale). Adjest the contrast values to give the best distinction. Don't scan at too high a resolution (Sounds crazy, but try it)

A useful general scanning tip: if you are scanning thinnish paper with text or images on both sides, place a sheet of black paper behind to stop the reverse side showing through during the scan.