Large-Scale Paper-To-Digital Conversion?

An anonymous reader writes "I've just been asked to digitize several dozen sets of lecture outlines at the university where I work. Basically, professors want to hand me a big (often 100+ page) stack of their handwritten lecture notes (with messy text, equations, and diagrams; sometimes double-sided) and expect me to post a PDF-or-something-similar to their course's web page. However, every desktop scanner I've ever used takes 1-2 minutes of user-attention per page and the resulting files end up Huge, impossible-to-read, or both. All I have at my disposal is my PowerBook, Acrobat, a couple hundred dollars of department funds for a new scanner (this maybe?), and, if I ask nicely, overnight use of the secretary's Win2k box. Any ideas? Sheet-fed scanner recommendations? Better file formats than PDF (or better PDF settings)? Do any of you students have usability advice?"

Comments

Outsource to India

[Animats]

This is a job made for outsourcing to India.

Outsource it

[bshroyer]

This looks like a job for cheap manual labor. Try India. Or an unpaid intern.

Don't you dare moderate this as a troll. You know as well as I do that this is probably the only viable solution.

Bret