[ubuntu-uk] Scanners & OCR

[Rob Beard]

On 18/08/10 18:25, Simon Wears wrote:
> Heyhey everybody!
>
> I'm looking at investing in a scanner so I can digitise my university
> notes this coming academic year. I was wondering if anyone has a scanner
> they can recommend that works well with Ubuntu? Ideally it would be a
> tray-fed scanner, so I can put in several sheets at a time and just hit
> a nice big 'GO' button, and it would scan it all into a single PDF.
> Bonus points if it can scan both sides of the paper in one go.
>
> Also, has anyone tried any available OCR software for Ubuntu? It'd be
> great if I could scan in my notes into text, which would make them all
> searchable!
>
> Simon Wears
> http://MunkyJunky.comb
>

Hmm, it's been a while since I looked into scanners, guess it depends 
how much you want to spend.  IIRC some of the higher end HP ScanJet 
scanners have ADF feeder options although the scanners I've seen in the 
shops tend to be basic flat bed models.

Guess it depends on your budget, but maybe you could look at a combined 
scanner/copier/printer with ADF unit (they seem to be more readily 
available).  One such printer I tried recently was a Lexmark (X264) 
which was networked and scanned to e-mail, so basically you could scan 
anything and it would convert it to a PDF (it supported colour and black 
and white) and would e-mail it out.

As far as OCR software goes, I've never tried any on Linux, last time I 
tried OCR software was on Windows and I'm not sure if it's improved or 
not, it certainly wasn't good enough to read handwriting.  You say your 
notes are in text, will they be handwritten notes or typed up?

Rob