[WEB4LIB] Adobe Acrobat Capture 2.0

[Richard Wiggins]

Is this the sort of application where you have a huge collection of
documents, and you want to do one pass over each page of each document, and
have confidence that you've got each page in high fidelity?  If that's the
case, you might check out the PDF Image + Text format.

Back in 1993 I served on an industry panel at the introduction of Acrobat. 
>From the start I think they've understood the importance of preserving
original image and layout of a document, while making the online version
searchable.  I'm not sure anyone else out there really gets the importance
of having both features at once.

The original vision of Acrobat included handling high-volume batch transfers
of historical paper documents to electronic form, with the ability to go
back and re-process any given page (e.g. re-OCR it) if closer examination
made this necessary.  For instance, one early customer was the US Navy, with
warehouses full of print documents that needed to be converted to
electronic.  You couldn't afford to have an OCR operator carefully review
every questionable OCR output, but you could afford to save questionable
entries electronically -- down to the character level -- and re-process them
later if need be.  It's the ability to "re-scan" without having to put the
paper to platen again.

I think many reviewers look at Capture as a mere competitor to other OCR
products, and not in this light.  Capture may not be the best OCR solution,
but it may be the best batch-capture solution for historical documents.

Further information:

Acrobat vs Textbridge:

http://www.planetpdf.com/mainpage.asp?WebPageID=507

Nice Acrobat definitions with examples:

http://www.document-solutions.com/definition.html

Law firm that manages mountains of paper evidence documents using Capture:

http://www.adobe.com/epaper/spotlights/hollandhart/pdfs/hollandhart.pdf

ZDnet review of Capture (I'm not sure they get it fully):

http://www.zdnet.com/products/content/zdim/0301/zdim0059.html

Octavo Books, which publishers electronic scanned editions of some of the
rarest books on Earth:

http://www.adobe.com/epaper/spotlights/octavo/main.html
/rich
www.netfact.com/rww

------Original Message------
From: Sharon Berglund <sharonb at hawaii.edu>
To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: April 21, 2000 2:43:18 AM GMT
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Adobe Acrobat Capture 2.0


Aloha,

Are any of you using Adobe Acrobat Capture to create searchable pdf
documents?  We are thinking of using this product to mount our collection
of historical documents and would like to know the success and
shortcomings of this product, especially any advantages it might have over
the most current version of generic Adobe Acrobat.

Your collective wisdom is greatly appreciated.

Sharon L. Berglund
Hawaii Medical Library      voice 808-536-9302
1221 Punchbowl Street       fax   808-524-6956
Honolulu, Hawaii 96813      email sharonb at hawaii.edu
OR  berglund at hml.org

Richard Wiggins
Consulting, Writing & Training on Internet Topics
www.netfact.com/rww         wiggins at mail.com
517-349-6919 (home office)  517-353-4955 (work)  
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