optical character recognition of PDFs of parliamentary debates

Answer 1

Cut the pages down the middle before you scan.

Answer 2

It depends what OCR software you are using. A few years ago I did some work with an OCR API, I cant quite remember the name but I think there's lots of alternatives. Anyway this API allowed me to define regions on the page to OCR, If you always know roughly where the columns are you could use an SDK to map out parts of the page.

Answer 3

I use Omnipage 17 for such things. It has an batchmode too, where you can put the documents in an folder, where they was grabed, and put the result into another. It autorecognit the layout, include columns, or you can set the default layout to columns. You can set many options how the output should look like. But try a demo, if it goes correct. I have at the moment problems with ligaturs in some of my documents. So words like "fliegen" comes out as "fl iegen" so you must spell them.

Answer 4

ABBYY FineReader Engine will perfectly well handle multicolumn text. In vesrion 9 it has ADRT technology that improves layout recunstruction of documents. Check it out here: http://www.abbyy.com/finereader_engine/