Turn a scanned textbook into an editable file

Scanned chapters are a picture of a book. This reads them and writes a Word file that keeps the headings, the numbered lists and the tables rather than a wall of lines.

• One heading scale across the whole document, not one per page.
• Bulleted and numbered lists come back as lists.
• Nothing is uploaded, and there is no page-per-day cap.

Headings are the part that goes wrong at length

A heading is a heading by being taller than the prose around it, and "the prose around it" used to be measured a page at a time. On a long scan set alike throughout, pages carrying a little less text measured their own body slightly large, and the same chapter title cleared the bar on ten pages and fell under it on two.

The scale is settled across the document instead, taken from the page with the most lines on it, and each page is compared against the smaller of that and its own reading. Measured against a real twelve-page scan, reading each page alone found ten titles and this found eleven. The headings are then ranked across the whole document before any of them is called level one, or the outline restarts on every chapter.

Lists, and the bullet that is really a letter

Word sets a round bullet as the letter l in a symbol font. Read as text that is a stray letter at the head of every item, and the item never becomes a list at all. Which font a single-character word was set in is the whole of the evidence, and it is what is used.

A hanging indent is the other trap: the number sits in a box of its own, so the page reports 1 and the sentence as two separate lines and no pattern over the text can join them. A marker alone on a line is joined to the line under it when that line starts further right, which is the shape of a hanging indent and not the shape of a page number above a heading.

Is there a page limit?

The limits for a single run are shown on the panel. Long books are best done a chapter at a time.

Do I need Word?

No. It is a standard .docx, which Pages, LibreOffice and Google Docs all open.

Support and billing: support@gosmartpdf.com. Operated by Mrityunjay Kumar, India. Payments by Dodo Payments, our merchant of record.

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