Since 1982 the Libertarian Futurist Society has published a print newsletter called Prometheus. I served as editor from 1994 until 2000, and have handled the duties again since 2004. On and off for many years I have tried to bring the newsletter online, both the archives and current issues. Getting the old issues online has been an arduous process. Years ago I scanned all the issues with OCR software into text files. Since then I have tried—in between the spare moments that I have—to clean up garbled text. All issues since 2005 are fairly clean in terms of OCR, but older issues remain in various stages. Since 2005 I have been able to use the desktop publishing software to print PDF copies. But getting the older issues to PDF has not really worked out for me, as either my scanning software doesn’t handle the job, or the files are far too huge.
Then I tried a new application, A-PDF from a-pdf.com. This is a Windows OS app, and I work almost exclusively in Mac OS X. However, I scanned an issue, which went fairly quickly, and then in one click of a button converted the images to PDF. I was simply amazed. My goal now is to scan the remaining issues all to PDF, continue to clean up the OCR text, and then publish the entire set of over 100 issues online as both PDF and searchable content. If you are looking for an app that scans documents and generates a PDF, this might be one of the best solutions out there.
