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@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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