Jan 11, 2011 A member on here sent me a link to scan from irfanview and it works well. I just scanned two pages and wanted both pages to be contained in one document rather than two separate files. I selected 'Multipage Images' in Irfanview and tried to save it as a PDF to the desktop but I can't find it.
I must have been impressed with what I read about Irfanview some time ago as searching for it on my PC I find I have it already. Having fired it up I don't see anything that would enable me to combine a set of jpegs (76 in all) into one PDF document. When I look at Irfanview's website I can see a series of plugins one of which mentions mPDF's.
My questions are: Would I be advised to completely erase/uninstall everything to do with Irfanview and start all over again? Would a fresh download have what is necessary to do the job re PDF 's or would I need to start adding plugins to the download? Thanks for the information re Irfanview, I have now successfully joined together jpegs of my fathers typewritten (not word processed) memoirs. The search facility does not work so is it possible to create some sort of index, book-marks, keyword list, to enable readers to find a reference to a particular word or topic?
Up to now I have been converting the jpegs to Word via OCR software, which works well but takes a long time and I find it hard to resist editing some of Dad's remarks - which would probably be useful, but is a different project. JPEGS, and the PDF derived from them, are just like photographic images, so the PC sees them just like any other images, and cannot extract any text, perform text searches, or the like. The only solution, as you have discovered, is Optical Character Recognition ( OCR) software, which scans the images searching for pixel patterns of character fonts. Some OCR packages are better than others, but it also depends on the quality of the original typed text, and the scanned image resolution. Having captured the text I would insert it into the Source Record as a transcript in the Text From Source field, and then you can add any 'editorial' comments in the Note field.
Earlier I tried to open Irfanview but had some error messages re folder not found so uninstalled everything with that name and then reinstalled ( ie fresh download) taking the opportunity to download the plugin folder. Irfanview appears to be working ok inasmuch as I have used it for scanning and for editing. When it comes to converting a batch of jpegs to pdf I seem to have failed somewhat. The method I have been trying is to use FileBatch Conversion/Rename; I find the files in their folder,nominate a destination,and see the jpg to pdf conversion 'appear' to run.
Afterwards there appear to be no new pdf's. Does anyone use a different approach or am I missing a trick here and approaching this from the wrong direction?
Dagwoodconfused Edit: Of course the earlier post showed a Multipage approach! I'll try again!! Gosh, am I impressed with Irfanview! The thumbnails worked beautifully, displaying discs and folders like Windows Explorer, such a time saver and aid to file selection. Using Thumbnails I located the 65 pages of my mother's life story and in just two or three steps had created a single document in PDF format.
I had especially wanted to be able to open it on my iPad so located it into Dropbox,clicked on Open In, selected iBooks, and there it was Kindle style with 'flickable' pages! I should just say that before I opened it in iBooks I noticed that it opened in a continuous scroll format.still easy to read though.
I am so impressed with how easy it was, and am very grateful for all the advice given. While the scanner is linked up and I'm in IRFANVIEW mode I tried to scan some photos to support the PDF I have just created. Previously if I scanned for example four 6x4 photos on the platen and then opened the resulting image in Elements I could split the scan into four separate images in one operation needing only to give each image a file name before saving it. Today I have scanned the four photo setup using Irfanview and whilst I get four individual images on the screen in the preview phase once the scan is complete I can see only one of the images. When I save that I cannot see the other three and it seems as if they have not been scanned or at least I cannot find them. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong?
Tatewise said: JPEGS, and the PDF derived from them, are just like photographic images, so the PC sees them just like any other images, and cannot extract any text, perform text searches, or the like. The only solution, as you have discovered, is Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software, which scans the images searching for pixel patterns of character fonts. Some OCR packages are better than others, but it also depends on the quality of the original typed text, and the scanned image resolution. Having captured the text I would insert it into the Source Record as a transcript in the Text From Source field, and then you can add any 'editorial' comments in the Note field.