From Paper To PDF? (Score 1)

The Adobe literature makes it sound as if you need to license a $6,000 package with per-copy charges in order to do this. However, I've found (to my surprise), that the ordinary $400 package allows you to do quite a bit of the "paperless office" thing. You can "import" from paper to PDF -- in fact it integrates with the scanner driver. Moreover, the package has an incredibly accurate OCR capability built in. We have scanned (but not OCR'ed) quite a few documents with this package, and put them on an intranet. I haven't (yet) hit any particular limits. In addition, there is a complete 500 page spec. available with the PDF file layout, if you feel like writing your own stuff. I found a Perl module on CPAN that could extract some simple information from a PDF, and in conjunction with that, put together a search engine that allows you to index and search on "keywords" etc. manually coded into the file. It works for me. Writing a full text search program (for OCR'd or "distilled" documents) shouldn't be too hard. As soon as I find some code to deal with the internal text compression, I may do it.