Is Making a PBB Difficult? (When the add-on is available)

You can skim through the tutorial on how to do a PBB in the old Logos 3 method: http://www.logos.com/media/pbb/tutorial.html. I'm sure there will be something similar once PBB is implemented in Logos 4. But it's not much harder than formatting a Word document with various heading styles, and putting in a few special codes for links (which are well documented and not too hard to understand).

If you can get a book already in PDF format, I'd certainly do that to avoid the time spent scanning.

Blair Laird said:

Rosie Perera said:

If you can get a book already in PDF format, I'd certainly do that to avoid the time spent scanning.

I am personally hoping Logos figures out how to make the scanned Pdf's searchable. I have all my public domain books in my google library for that very purpose. I dont know how they did it but they figured out how to make them searchable. I just dont like having to seperate search engines. They should be unvailing the Pbb soon, last I heard they did not have the scanned pdf book support. But we will see if they figured out how to incorporate the technology.

Scanned PDFs can become searchable by running OCR software on them (optical character recognition). Most scanning software has that option built in nowadays. It's slower, and it makes the PDF file take up more space when it has the OCRed text in it as opposed to just the images, but it means that you can then select text and copy/paste it, as well as search it. As I've got Adobe Acrobat, I can create PDF files that are fully selectable and searchable from a Word document. There are cheaper alternatives for doing this too (e.g., print to PDF using BullZip PDF printer driver). If you have a scanned image PDF that has not been OCR'ed there are ways to do that too, and probably free utilities for doing it.

My guess is that Logos would prefer to have you convert your existing scanned OCRed PDFs to Logos PBBs (and presumably they will someday provide a tool to make that easier) than to provide native support in Logos for viewing/searching PDF files. It would be easier to write such a conversion tool than to write a full-blown Acrobat Reader knock-off. And the books would be able to be more fully integrated into your library that way, as they'd have real Logos indexing (if the book were a special translation of the Bible, for example; it could be indexed by Scripture reference and thus linked in with your commentaries), you could edit them to add hyperlinks, etc.

Blair Laird said:

I am not familiar with any ocr software that leaves the image intact yet makes it searchable and hyperlinkable.

Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not just Acrobat Reader) can do it:

Settings...

Here's the job it did with an article about my brother in Haiti. Not perfect text recognition, but pretty good. I can select the text and only a few word chunks are left out:

5428.rick_bam.pdf

This is just like what happens on Google when some of the text in scanned books couldn't be recognized. I guarantee you they use some sort of OCR software, probably something proprietary that is better than what's commercially available for the rest of us poor sods.

Blair Laird said:

Rosie Perera said:

This is just like what happens on Google when some of the text in scanned books couldn't be recognized. I guarantee you they use some sort of OCR software, probably something proprietary that is better than what's commercially available for the rest of us poor sods.

It has to be some special software.I have used adobe, I found that Nuances ocr software worked better for me. Using either software I was not aware of hyperlinking capability.  

I'm not familiar with Nuance, but in Adobe, you do this using the "Link Tool" on the Advanced Editing toolbar or menu:

Blair Laird said:

I agree google uses some sort of ocr software, but it is not like any ocr sofware that I am aware of.

And yes, I know it's some special software, not Adobe Acrobat (and probably not Nuance either) that they're using to do this. The behavior and look of their hyperlinks is quite different from the ones that Acrobat puts in, and they've got a higher quality of text recognition than at least Adobe does. I just meant that it is some sort of OCR technology which they are using, and whatever engine it is they're using, it's all rooted in the same idea of optically recognizing characters to convert an image to searchable text, being able to mark locations in it with bookmarks, adding hyperlinks to be able to jump to those bookmarks, etc. There's no other way to do it when you're starting with a printed book without having access to the original data files. You've got to do some optical character recognition, which is how Adobe and Nuance approach it. Google probably wrote their own higher quality one, rather than taking one "off the shelf" so to speak. So we're just dithering over nothing about whether it is "like" other OCR software. It is like in kind, but not in quality. And Google's is most likely not available to the public, to help in making PBBs, which is how this whole conversation got started. So you win, and I quit trying to have the last word. [;)]

Jim Towler said:

My point - Someone as large as Google need not be limited by what we normally think of as an OCR package on a PC in the corner of the office where the scanner is installed.

EDIT: Which is really the point Rosie was making ...

Precisely. I was never saying Google was using a PC-based OCR package.