Newgen was quick to realize the emergence of the Web as a critical medium in the publishing domain and built a complete document conversion unit to explore opportunities in this area. The core workflow of this unit has always been in sharp contrast to the industry norm of converting from typeset pages to various formats.

End-users, librarians, and content aggregators are unrelenting in their demand for primary publishers to disseminate scholarly content in electronic form. With this in mind, Newgen offers customers cost-effective solutions for the repurposing and archiving of data.

We can deliver a range of paper-to-data digital conversion services for previously published material that enable the preservation of vast repositories of textual and graphic information.

Scanning, OCR, and online PDFs (SCOOP) is our most recent solution to the provision of vast quantities of online data at exceptionally low cost when all you have to work with are printed copies.

First, we unbind and scan printed books and journals to produce an image of the typeset page, which is automatically de-skewed, cropped, and de-speckled.

Then, OCR (optical character recognition) software extracts the text and places it behind the image: the reader sees the original typography but can search the content. Optionally, information-rich parts of the file-the headers and references for journal articles, say-can be keyed in and tagged for higher accuracy. And images can be scanned separately for higher quality.

The final PDF is optimized to balance quality of rendition against file size, so that the user gets something readable that downloads quickly. Our current installed capacity is 100,000 pages/day, and the workflow model is highly scalable owing to state-of-the-art scanning equipment and smart automation.

At the end of the process, printed volumes can be rebound and returned.

See sample scanned legacy document - and the same document after post-scan image processing.