Digitization: Splitting Pages in ABBYY

Purpose: To split two-page scans into single page scans in ABBYY before doing OCR work.

When scanning pages on the Kirtas machine, each page is scanned and processed separately. Occasionally, it is necessary to do OCR work on a file where the pages have been scanned as spreads (i.e., two pages at once). While it is sometimes possible to OCR an entire spread, the quality of the OCR work will be higher if the pages are split first.

• Open ABBYY and select “Open Files” from the icon menu. (Do NOT select “Open and Read”; you must split the pages before you read them.)
• Select the first spread, and go to “Image” on the top menu, then “Split image.”
• When the warning message appears, check “Don’t show this message next time” and click “OK.”
• If all or most of the pages in the batch are scanned as spreads, check “Move to next unread page.” (This will prevent you from having to select each spread individually.)
• Select “Split dual pages.”
• If the vertical blue bar appears in the right place (over the black line separating the pages, roughly the same distance from the inside margins of both pages), select “OK.”
• If the vertical blue bar does not appear in the right place, drag it to the right place with mouse. (If you have to do this for many pages, it may be more efficient to select “Add vertical separator” and manually select the splitting point for each spread instead of selecting “Split dual pages.”)
• Continue until all spreads are split into pages, then select “Read All Pages” from the icon menu.

Contact: um.library.technical.services@maine.edu

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