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Re:Ask HN: I scanned an old paper book. How to turn it into ... by dtagames on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @07:59AM (#33800027)
The simplest method is to use Adobe Acrobat to make a OCR'd PDF. There is no work to that process other than combining all the PDFs you want into a single file -- and that's something you can do inside Acrobat, too. It has OCR built in and will save the OCR'd text inside the file.

Once you have a PDF, that is an eBook. There are several online converters that can turn it into other formats. As for indices, etc., Acrobat won't make them automatically but your OCR'd eBook is searchable, so it may not matter in the same way it would with print.

I'd say the world would be better off with your rough-and-ready PDF (and yes, in the Internet Archive would be great!) than waiting for a perfect hand-made version.

Re:Ask HN: I scanned an old paper book. How to turn it into ... by ThinkBeat on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @08:34AM (#33800450)
I do have the text OCRed for the most part. I do have to go through it all and look for mistakes. As it stands right now it is all in one PDF file. Each page is an image with text available "beneath" (?)

So you can highlight text and copy paste if you want.

but yes.

I am not sure I will ever have the time to truly make it perfect.

I will have to try and see how easy / hard it is.

Re:Ask HN: I scanned an old paper book. How to turn it into ... by xeonmc on Wednesday November 30, 2022 @09:38AM (#33801328)
Do you still have the raw images as individual files? Or is the scan's most original form that monolithic PDF?