[LAU] How to handle large amount of pdf files (music sheets) for collaborative usage

[Luke Peterson]

PDFsam -- PDF Split-And-Merge is a handy open-source tool. (
http://www.pdfsam.org/)

But its title is its featureset, for the most part. It allows you to reorder
PDFs, pull pages out, add pages in, rotate pages 90, 180, 270 degrees, etc.
Command-line driven but there's also a gui console.

It's got a windows installer, but should run anywhere Java is available.

Sounds like on top of the scanning and organizing solution, you need to
figure out some OCR application to extract metadata from each of the PDFs in
a large-scale way.

If you're planning to put these out for public consumption, you can use
Google to assist you in your scanning and indexing:

http://www.labnol.org/software/convert-scanned-pdf-images-to-text-with-google-ocr/5158/

Alternatively, the open-source OCR world is getting better fast. Check out
OCRopus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCRopus) -- it's a linux-based
command-line OCR tool. You should be able to incorporate this into a
workflow, it'll spit out what it thinks your PDF says in htmlish (specified
here: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=dfxcv4vc_67g844kf).

I could see a workflow on your end that creates four rotations of each page
scanned, then attempts to OCR them in each degree of rotation with OCRopus,
compares the results, and persists in your datastore the one with the
highest combination of recognized characters and recognition score. I
suppose this is only really helpful if a) your PDFs often get scanned
upside-down or sideways, and b) all your PDFs have some amount of digital
typography on them.

Anyway, a couple ideas.

-----
Luke Peterson


On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Nils Hammerfest <list at nilsgey.de> wrote:

> > Get a quality enterprise content management system. There is a
> > full-blown FOSS one called Alfresco that you could try out and see how
> > it goes:
> >
> > http://www.alfresco.com/products/networks/compare/
>
>
> Thanks for your information. I will have a look at this
>
> > > 2) Do you know any free PDF editor besides "PDFEdit" (which seemed fine
> from screenshots and descriptions, but first tries were not successful)
> >
> > Sorry, have no clue there, the usual advice about editing PDFs is to
> > edit the SOURCE document and regenerate the PDF. PDFs really aren't
> > intended to be edited - text editing even in Adobe Acrobat is tedious.
> >
>
> The problem here is that those PDFs are generated by scans. So in fact we
> are dealing with mostly images of notation here. The main tasks here are to
> add/delete pages, rotate single pages or "all uneven" etc. or crop borders
> for a section, selection, all etc. and in the end save them again. I think
> with some scripts it should be possible to do the decrompress/compress thing
> from pdf->images->pdf but still this leaves the point of pagewise editing. I
> don't know for sure but I think gimp or inkscape cannot do this.
>
> Nils
>
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