Digitize notepad to PDF (ebook) while preserving typography

Question

I'm looking for a way to convert a notepad (multiple pages of hand-written text) into a PDF or other e-book type file format (DjVu?) that would preserve existing typography as well as allow searching and selecting texts.

One more difficulty with it is a fact that pages I have got some hand-painted graphs on them, which would also require preserving in output format (these can be pure graphics)

I got scanner and some OCR to make an initial run through it if required, but if there's and all-in one solution that can take scanned pages and convert them to ebook - it'd be great.

Looking for suggestions what I can use :)

Answer 1

I'm looking for a way to convert a notepad (multiple pages of hand-written text) into a PDF or other e-book type file format (DjVu?) that would preserve existing typography as well as allow searching and selecting texts.

You would have to build an image based ebook if you want to preserve typography. Please understand if you have a full notepad worth of data your file size will be excessive and very hard to view.

One more difficulty with it is a fact that pages I have got some hand-painted graphs on them, which would also require preserving in output format (these can be pure graphics)

I would use something like Photoshop or Gimp to crop the graphs.

I would strongly advise to use what graphical elements you prefer and type the rest if you want it to be searchable. The method you are requesting is difficult but you could do an image based ebook, you will still have to type everything and use some JavaScript to hide or trick the text.

You could always try this with pasting your "images" and printing as PDF: Working With Hidden Text in Word Documents

I have been asked to do this before and ran across this discussion on the Adobe Forums: Adding text as hidden layer in PDF's

That said if you are wanting it to be searchable you will have to type out the text at some point so unless its Calligraphy you would best set to use what images you need and type the rest.

For future reference if someone wants to know how to make searchable text from an image: How to create a searchable text document from a scanned page

Also, if you ever plan to publish this it will be hard to get it out because:

1. average file limit is 20mb
2. some platforms require, visible, searchable text,
3. some deny any text that is given as an image

Answer 2

preserving typography

And

multiple pages of hand-written text

And

allow searching and selecting texts

combined with

hand-painted graphs

What you are asking is not possible. Well, not possible unless you create your own font file for the handwriting.

If you wish to retain hand-drawn type appearance and custom hand-drawn graphs you either need to create a custom font file using FontLab or Fontographer or Glyph.... or use images. Images are not text-searchable, never have been. There's no way around that.

If you are not interested in preserving the appearance of the hand written text, then you may be able to scan each page, run it through an OCR application and get resulting text files. OCR is still fairly inaccurate much of the time. So, I'd encourage some hefty proofreading after using any OCR application. Also, be aware, Adobe Acrobat is an OCR application. You can open a scanned image in Acrobat and run the OCR feature on the scan to get a text file.

Once you have a text file, you could use any number of applications to layout a book, from InDesign and QuarkXpress, to even Word or Pages.