Korean Job Discussion Forums

[lukas]

Anyone know of a copy shop that is able to scan a book and convert it .PDF(or others) format?

I am taking a class at yonsei next month and if I could upload the books onto my reader, it would be infinitely better than lugging them around..

So far Ive been to a handful of shops around bucheon but they are only able to scan, not make PDFs. Thanks in advance if anyone has some info

[furtakk]

don't know about places that will make pdfs, but if they can make scans it's really easy to make a pdf yourself. as long as the jpgs or whatever format they use are numbered properly, there are programs that will take all the jpgs and make a pdf out of them.

[red_devil]

Most scans will output as JPG or TIFF. TIFF will give you better resolution. Then just Adobe PDF you can merge all the files into a PDF.

[caribmon]

Also if you don't have Adobe Acrobat, you can download the open source PDF maker for free

[Troglodyte]

Almost all of the new large-ish photocopiers can be connected to a computer (or a network) and used as a printer and scanner. Depending on the software that they use, the scans can be saved in a variety of formats, including PDF. Not all software will save it in TIFF format, but it may not be necessary to save it in that format anyway. I presume that you're dealing mainly with black and white text, maybe medium quality images (color or gray scale). In that case, even a 300 dpi scan in gray scale will save just fine in jpg or other format. Once you have all the pages scanned (which shouldn't take any longer than actually xeroxing them - faster in fact) you can convert them to a PDF file yourself.

If you're in Bucheon, I can do it for you if you can't figure it out. Just make sure that the pages are scanned in order (or renamed to go in the correct order).

By the way, are the pages that you're scanning from a permanently bound book? Or are they loose leaf or bound with a removable plastic spiral?

[seoulsteve]

How about the opposite? Has anyone had a printer make a book out of a pdf file?

[Troglodyte]

I haven't been to a copy shop to do that in Korea, but I've done it myself. I've done it at copy shops in other countries though. It depends on how nice you want the book to be. If you just want something cheap and simple, they can put one of those spiral spines on it. If you want something nicer, most print shops could probably send the file off to have it printed and bound. Either way, it's not terribly expensive. A spine costs from 100 to 700 Won depending on the size. A plastic or card sheet for the covers (basically a sheet of A4 made of plastic) will cost a couple hundred depending on thickness and how nice it looks. If you know someone with the hole punch and spiral stretching machine, you can do it yourself for free.

I would guess that any copy shop near a university would do it.