Deskew a PDF

[Bay]

Anyone that has ever worked with scanned documents has experienced the same problem I'm having - crookedness! Yes, you know, when the page goes through the scanner crooked making the pdf image crooked.

Does anyone know if Affinity has any capability to deskew a crooked PDF?

Thank you!

[Old Bruce]

Affinity Photo has the perspective tool.

[Bay]

10 minutes ago, Old Bruce said:

Affinity Photo has the perspective tool.

I'll have to look that up and test it but my guess is that it's not a manual feature- not automatic. How would that work for a 30 page document?

 

[Wosven]

First, get a refill of coffee, and roll up your sleeves

[Bay]

25 minutes ago, Wosven said:

First, get a refill of coffee, and roll up your sleeves

LOL. Noted. ✅

[Fixx]

I would use XnConvert which has automatic deskew. 

Handling PDFs may require installation of Ghostscript. And I think XnConvert does not do multipage PDFs, it processes only first page. Separating pages is though not so complicated with right tools.

On the other hand, if all pages have same skew you can use transform panel in Affinity and paste same angle to each page quite quick.

[PaulEC]

13 hours ago, Bay said:

Anyone that has ever worked with scanned documents has experienced the same problem I'm having - crookedness!

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's better not to skew the document in the first place! Most (decent) scanning software will have a deskew option. If you're using a scanner with autofeed, that should also keep the pages straight. If you're scanning pages one at a time, make sure they line up with the side of the scanner. If all else fails, use the straighten option within the crop tool. (If it's a scanned document you shouldn't need the perspective tool, that is more for a photo of a document, where the camera was not perfectly square to the document.) This does mean a lot of work, if you have lots of pages, as there is no way of doing it automatically. (Unless, as Fixx says the angle of skew is the same on all of them.)

[Bay]

42 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

At the risk of stating the obvious, it's better not to skew the document in the first place! Most (decent) scanning software will have a deskew option. If you're using a scanner with autofeed, that should also keep the pages straight. If you're scanning pages one at a time, make sure they line up with the side of the scanner. If all else fails, use the straighten option within the crop tool. (If it's a scanned document you shouldn't need the perspective tool, that is more for a photo of a document, where the camera was not perfectly square to the document.) This does mean a lot of work, if you have lots of pages, as there is no way of doing it automatically. (Unless, as Fixx says the angle of skew is the same on all of them.)

Thanks for the reply Paul! Yes, I agree with you about scanning carefully. Unfortunately, my request for help is in reference to very old scans others have created. I'm imagining a world where the scanners were the size of small desks; not the pocket-sized versions we have today with the necessary software that performs all of the necessary adjustments automatically.

Someday, my guess is that we'll reach herd immunity from such terrible scans. The topics and relevancy of the old scans will become extinct and replaced by the current age of perfectly scanned digital documents.

[Wosven]

If you've got the original book, it can be scanned for a reasonnable price and time (with possibility for them to send it back whole, of letting them unbound it), and get Words documents with and without OCR, ePub, images, etc.

It can be usefull when needing to repring some old books.

[PaulEC]

With this sort of job, personally I would straighten them by hand, using the crop tool, but if you want an automated way you could try Fixx's suggestion of XNconvert or Google for an online solution. Best of luck, getting the job done. 🙂

[Bay]

4 hours ago, PaulEC said:

With this sort of job, personally I would straighten them by hand, using the crop tool, but if you want an automated way you could try Fixx's suggestion of XNconvert or Google for an online solution. Best of luck, getting the job done. 🙂

 

4 hours ago, Wosven said:

If you've got the original book, it can be scanned for a reasonnable price and time (with possibility for them to send it back whole, of letting them unbound it), and get Words documents with and without OCR, ePub, images, etc.

It can be usefull when needing to repring some old books.

Agree, thank you guys!