Uploaded June 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 days ago

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Welcome to method 3 of 4, of how to digitise a book to PDF. Here we will be using a photocopier, which most schools and universities have.
 
Normally when I am digitising books I tend to use ABBYY fine reader as my scanning software and Adobe Acrobat pro as my PDF digitizer.
 
However, in this method and the following methods, I will be using only FREE SOFTWARE so you won't have to spend a penny and the quality will be every bit as good.
 
Normally these scans result in a double page view in pdf. PDF EXCHANGE EDITOR will be needed to convert the images to JPEG.
 
Next we will be using XNCONVERT in order to crop and whiten the pages in case they are yellowish or if they are showing A ghost image of the other side of the page.
 
Then we will use PIXILLON image converter to join the images into a single PDF document.
 
After that, we use BRISS, to split the pdf pages to singular pages.
 
Then we use PIXILLON image converter to join any pdfs and images belonging to this book into a single PDF document.
 
And finally open the document in PDF EXCHANGE EDITOR in order to OCR the document so that we can have the ability to highlight text and copy it.

Scanning software - NAPS2
naps2.com
sourceforge.net/projects/naps2

Xnconvert
xnview.com/en/xnconvert

antrenamer
antp.be/software/renamer/download

Pixillion Image Converter
nchsoftware.com/imageconverter/index.html

Briss - dual-page spitter
sourceforge.net/projects/briss/files

java for briss
java.com/en/download

PDF-XChange Editor
tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

portable version pdf-xchange
softpedia.com/get/Office-tools/PDF/PDF-XChange-Editor-Portable.shtml

Loads of free software
nchsoftware.com/software/index.html

Free-PDF-Compressor
softsea.com/download/Free-PDF-Compressor.html