which software to align & centre scanned pages?

[bcr]

Hi all,

I'm digitizing some very old publications, and I've 'scanned' the pages using a DSLR.

I need to compile them into a PDF and align the pages consistently. Some of the scans are off centre by a CM or two and they're not consistent.

So I want to align the pages so that they are consistent and then crop any excess off.

There is a page number on nearly all pages which I can use as the centre point of the scan for alignment. But what method and what program would you do this part in?

I have Adobe Creative Cloud.

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[EdwardB]

photo replication of a document? how 1980s...

combine all of your JPGs into a single PDF using Acrobat DC Pro. Then you can "edit" pages and nudge the photo(s) around on the page(s) to align them. You can also manually place your photos on InDesign pages, moving/resizing/ect as needed to align. The InDesign route is just a little extra work.

 

[bcr]

photo replication of a document? how 1980s...

combine all of your JPGs into a single PDF using Acrobat DC Pro. Then you can "edit" pages and nudge the photo(s) around on the page(s) to align them. You can also manually place your photos on InDesign pages, moving/resizing/ect as needed to align. The InDesign route is just a little extra work.

yeah - we're talking high value historical publications of which there are no digital versions in existence. So in these circumstances, this is the proper way to do it, although if money is no object then you would probably use a robotic version which flips the pages for you, depending on how fragile the book is.

What i'm doing at present is creating a vertical watermark in Acrobat which is centre aligned, and then manually nudging the pages to align with that, using the page number as the alignment point.

But i feel like there must be a better way of doing it.

Edit - actually - the watermark method in Acrobat is not great, as then when you try to remove the watermark it then tries to perform OCR to make the page editable, which is not desirable. I'm doing the OCR in another application which is far superior.

 

[EdwardB]

yeah - we're talking high value historical publications of which there are no digital versions in existence. So in these circumstances, this is the proper way to do it, although if money is no object then you would probably use a robotic version which flips the pages for you, depending on how fragile the book is.

What i'm doing at present is creating a vertical watermark in Acrobat which is centre aligned, and then manually nudging the pages to align with that, using the page number as the alignment point.

But i feel like there must be a better way of doing it.

Edit - actually - the watermark method in Acrobat is not great, as then when you try to remove the watermark it then tries to perform OCR to make the page editable, which is not desirable. I'm doing the OCR in another application which is far superior.

you can turn off the OCR just by un-checkmarking "Recognize Text"

Another editing application called Prisma Prepare has the ability to make pages "transparent" so you can see if they are aligned (i.e. the page numbers are "stacked"). neat feature, but wouldn't really make what you are doing any easier. making "scans" uniform hasn't ever been easy. I'm sure someone will come out with an AI document editor (**COUGH**) that will automagically ruin every document it touches for you.

 

[PrintHusky]

What do you think of this ?
Short Video in Link - "Align content to template"

Dropbox

www.dropbox.com

Disclaimer: I am the lead developer.
I had send you a couple of other demo videos as well a while ago.

Best Regards