Maintenance Manuals - e-Form

[Mr. Fixit]

Due to the size of my boat, i was wondering if it would make sense to buy a scanner and convert my manuals and equiptment cutsheets to e-form. I am about as uninformed as possible when it comes to computers. So I ask is this possible? I had a scanner years ago and it did not preform all that well. The problem could have been me. So I ask does anybody out there do this and if so what should I look for in a scanner? My manuals fill a cabinet that I could use for something else if the info was on disc. Is there something I am missing that I should be considering? I will be on the water in 6 weeks or so and would like to use my available storage wisely.

[hellosailor]

1-The cost of a good duplexing scanner, like a Fujitsu ScanSnap at $400, or
2-The incredible amount of time feeding and turning a simplex scanner and
3-The need to cut bindings off bound material, or finesse them into a book scanner and
4-You hope you've got power when you need to access those manuals, and the printer so you can take a page back to the engine with you.

Great idea, but it won't be cheap or fast to scan everything. And of course, you'll need backups of everything in case your computer goes south. Or walkabout.

[frstjump]

Check out the Plustek OpticBook 3600 Plus. Scans within 6mm of the edge of the scanning bed. No need to destroy bindings. It is time consuming though. I did use Adobe Pro to convert to pdf files. I have a Mac and the current software is PC. Available on Amazon.

[hellosailor]

"No need to destroy bindings. It is time consuming though."
That's always a catch. With a duplex sheet fed scanner, 15 sheets (30 sides) per minute is on the low side. Without cutting off bindings...you'll be lucky to scan two sides per minute. Fifteen hours instead of one hour, fifteen days instead of one day...
If Guttenburg didn't print it, rebinding can be cost effective.<G>

[ausieman]

The PO of my boat didn't believe in keeping or lost most of the manuals for things on board so I've downloaded most of them. I'm sure with a bit of searching you'll find most of what you need is available this way negating the need to scan a lot of your documents.

[byteshredder]

Another factor that might influence your decision is the ability in the current version of Adobe to scan paper documents in such a way that will allow the resulting file to be searchable by any word in the document. I recently scanned a very old user manual that was stored in a 3 ring binder and the resulting PDF file can be searched by any word in the file. This has come in very handy even within this brief document. I have aspirations of being able to do a keyword search within my Yanmar 20GM engine service manual, a very large document of 200+ pages.