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

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-goog… 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