Advice about OCR text in ID

Question

This project is a total labor of love for my 90 year-old mother-in-law who wrote a weekly column for a small-town newspaper for years back in the 1980s.We are going to do a booklet compilation of her articles for the enjoyment of family and friends. (not to sell) We are looking into different printing options like the local Kinkos (digital printing and binding and another source for low volume hardback book printing.) No details yet.
I have basic ID skills but NO Acrobat experience which I own as part of my CS2 suite. It was suggested in this forum that Acrobat might be the way to go (project scope has changed since then) but I have spent several days trying to learn Acrobat. It's not coming easy for me so I've decided that ID is the program I am most comfortable with for this project. I've been experimenting with methods and doing a lot of research in the forums with threads that seemed applicable to my project.
I would greatly appreciate anyone who has the time to read through my proposed process and point out any errors that could turn out to be a problem with the end printing.
I haven't nailed down the overall design concept and presentation of the book because family members don't agree on things yet. (Ugh, that's a whole different challenge.) But I don't vision a master page layout deal because I really want to immitate the different layouts of the published articles, so I vision each page having its own personality.
So I just want to be productive in doing the grunt work of obtaining the articles and setting up individual pages in ID that might or not be used. Then I will put the final together according to the printer's instructions.
1. I obtain the articles from a paid subscription newspaper archive service and it gives me the option to save and view this PDF in Acrobat. The PDF is a "snapshot" of the newspaper page. Then I crop in Acrobat to just the article I want and print it out and save it.
2. Then I put the printed article on my scanner and push the text button on the front of the scanner. The articles are in different sizes  and number of columns but they are all consistent newspaper style—single-spaced, justified columns with a 3 space indent at the beginning of the paragraph. (I know that Acrobat has an OCR feature but I couldn't figure it out.)
3. Then the article appears in Microsoft Word 2000 as an rtf document all in one long page with inconsistent spacing between lines. It does have the paragraph indents and shows the typos or misunderstood characters in green. I fix all the typos etc. in word and it's obvious that there is inherent formatting involved but I have no idea how that happens from a scan or it it could create problems.
4. Last I copy all the text in word and paste it on my ID document guessing at the width of the column I want. Then I click on the overset (from Peter's response on a thread about text flowing) and make the remaining columns. But I want each article to be printed on one page so I don't want to risk it carrying over and ID making another page.The text shows up in ID as Gil Sans instead of Times Roman from Word. No huge deal I just select and change. There are no paragraph indents but I just added 3 spaces. (I know the nudge thing is bad and I promised not to do it again) so I need to understand the formatting.
So any glaring errors in my proposed methods that could make me cry and have to start over?
Thanks in advance,
Patty

Answer 1

Hi Patty.
I am working on a similar project that involves original newspaper clippings (not preserved well so they are quite yellow) from 1863.
> ...I have spent several days trying to learn Acrobat. It's not coming easy for me so I've decided that ID is the program I am most comfortable with for this project.
I very new to using InDesign and InCopy. There are three inexpensive learning resources that I am using: Lynda.com, the online resources of my public library, and this forum. Lynda.com offers excellent multi-media instruction, but it is time consuming to complete the courses (some exceed nine hours). The public library has contracted with certain publishers so that as a member, I have access to the electronic version of those extremely expensive instructional books that go out of date the next time a new version of the software is released (thereby saving me $$$).
> I haven't nailed down the overall design concept and presentation of the book because family members don't agree on things yet. (Ugh, that's a whole different challenge.) But I don't vision a master page layout deal because I really want to immitate the different layouts of the published articles, so I vision each page having its own personality.
Welcome to the world of a Self Published Author. ;-)
> So I just want to be productive in doing the grunt work of obtaining the articles and setting up individual pages in ID that might or not be used. Then I will put the final together according to the printer's instructions.
That sounds like a good plan.
> 1. I obtain the articles from a paid subscription newspaper archive service and it gives me the option to save and view this PDF in Acrobat. The PDF is a "snapshot" of the newspaper page. Then I crop in Acrobat to just the article I want and print it out and save it.
Okay, there might be some difficulties that crop up doing it that way. When a scanned image is cropped in Acrobat, the entire image remains intact and it is only the viewable area that is cropped--so no information is lost. That means if the article you want is in the center of a three column newspaper, all of the information surrounding that article will remain available.
It is possible to open the original image to Photoshop through Acrobat and permanently delete the extraneous information, but unfortunately I am not using CS2 so can not provide the command path to do so.
> 2. Then I put the printed article on my scanner and push the text button on the front of the scanner. The articles are in different sizes  and number of columns but they are all consistent newspaper style—single-spaced, justified columns with a 3 space indent at the beginning of the paragraph. (I know that Acrobat has an OCR feature but I couldn't figure it out.)
If the OCR is not working right, then it may be because it is OCR'ing the entire page, not just the area that was cropped.
Since Acrobat can OCR image files, so I see a couple options. Open the original in Photoshop through Acrobat, crop out all of the unnecessary text, align the article text so that it is in a single column, save it, then just initiate the OCR in Acrobat on that existing page.
Another option is to paste screen prints from the article as it appears in Acrobat into Photoshop, align the text into a single column, save it and then run the Acrobat OCR on that file.
> 3. Then the article appears in Microsoft Word 2000 as an rtf document all in one long page with inconsistent spacing between lines. It does have the paragraph indents and shows the typos or misunderstood characters in green. I fix all the typos etc. in word and it's obvious that there is inherent formatting involved but I have no idea how that happens from a scan or it it could create problems.
That's from Word, not the scan itself.
The only way I have been able to clean up the garbage-code Word creates has been to paste the text into Notepad, re-copy it, then Paste Special > Unformatted Text back into the same document (or sometimes a new doc). Then it's a manual process of cleaning up the text that is easier than working with the original scan.
For some reason, there have been times when I have used the Paste Special > Unformatted Text directly into Word and it has been almost as messy as the original, so I've opted to just paste to notepad, copy and repaste back into Word. Seems inefficient, but it works.
Best of luck with your project.