🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Jeremy:

At least their not trying to re-type the whole book. :)

This isn't really a scripting solution but it is a method that I've used many times for converting WMF files to PDFs or some other type of output.

My example is assuming that you are in a Windows environment. I'm also assuming that you have all letter size pages. If not, you will need to adjust your settings for different page sizes. The process is actually done with Microsoft Word. It can probably be done in other programs also, but I've had really good success with this method.

1. Open a blank Word document.

2. Set all of the page margins to zero for the top, bottom, left, and right. Or just set them to the minimum margin size.

3. Go to: Insert > Picture > From File...

4. Find the folder where all of the WMF images are stored.

5. This gets a little confusing, so bear with me a minute. If these need to be in any particular order, you can select multiple files at once. For example, if you have 10 pages named: page1.wmf, page2.wmf, page3.wmf, page4.wmf, page5.wmf,.....page10.wmf, select the range of pages in reverse order. Start with page10.wmf and select all 10 files up/down to page1.wmf. Be sure to select the first page (page1.wmf) last.
If you do this, then the focus will be on page1.wmf. You will see a faint dotted line around the file that will be the starting point. The rest of the files should import in the correct numeric order.
If you don't do it that way, you will most likely end up with the files importing as page10.wmf, page1.wmf, page2.wmf, page3.wmf...

6. After all of the files are placed in a Word document, you can create a PDF from there.
7. The PDF can then be used with OCR software to convert it to text.

I like the OmniPage Pro software for OCR. It does a pretty good job as long as the image was scanned at a high enough resolution. There is also AABBY FineReader that is also quite good. Acrobat has it's own OCR engine. It could be worth a try, but I wouldn't suggest it for this long of a book.

I hope this helps. Please re-post if you get stuck or need any additional help.

Good Luck!
TJV