I love the Atiz scanner for it's simplicity, good design, and utility. I love the Kirtas scanners for their speed and their "wow" factor when people see the things work.
The only problem I have at the moment is taking our current Kirtas workflow (using Kirtas's software Bookscan Editor, Superbatch, and OCR manager), and finding a way to make the Atiz scanner workflow work with it.
The Atiz machine came with a hefty batch editing program that does a great job of cleaning up the images and making them wonderfully presentable. The machine even came with a PDF maker, but it doesn't OCR on its own, and it doesn't give you the options that Kirtas' OCR manager do. So, I want to process the Atiz scanner finished images using Kirtas’s OCR manager. However, that seems to be more difficult than I had first expected.
For the next month, I’ll be trying to figure out how to make this marriage of Atiz and Kirtas systems work. If it ends up failing, then I may have to look into a separate option to OCR the images batched with the Atiz software. What am I thinking about? An OCR server that we are buying for another project. We’ll see how that goes.
The only problem I have at the moment is taking our current Kirtas workflow (using Kirtas's software Bookscan Editor, Superbatch, and OCR manager), and finding a way to make the Atiz scanner workflow work with it.
The Atiz machine came with a hefty batch editing program that does a great job of cleaning up the images and making them wonderfully presentable. The machine even came with a PDF maker, but it doesn't OCR on its own, and it doesn't give you the options that Kirtas' OCR manager do. So, I want to process the Atiz scanner finished images using Kirtas’s OCR manager. However, that seems to be more difficult than I had first expected.
For the next month, I’ll be trying to figure out how to make this marriage of Atiz and Kirtas systems work. If it ends up failing, then I may have to look into a separate option to OCR the images batched with the Atiz software. What am I thinking about? An OCR server that we are buying for another project. We’ll see how that goes.
Comments
The Atiz scanner takes the same kind of pictures as the Kirtas scanner does (that is, with the spine of the book being at the top of the image). The Kirtas machines record whether an image is a right or left hand side page by what camera it was taken with. It records this through XML files. It’s a brilliant method of recording it so that the batching software can treat the left hand side pages different than the right side pages. However, the Atiz scanner doesn’t record that metadata, so when you try to batch the Atiz scanner images, the software treats them all the same and half the images end up being upside down if you don’t pre-rotate them.
What I would like to do is either be able to use Bookscan Editor (Kirta’s software) to completely batch the images and have it rotate them correctly without the metadata (possibly by letting me tell the program whether odd or even images are left or right), or to have the OCR manager be able to OCR images that have been batched processed by other programs.