I just received my new Czur book scanner yesterday, purchased via their Indiegogo campaign ! I'm so excited to be able to index and search the content in all my favorite reference books by keywords.

The Czur scanning software isn't very intuitive, so here's a quick guide to what I've learned!

Setup

First of all, assemble your Czur scanner using the included screwdriver.

Download the user guide and install the software from http://czurtek.net/index.php/tech_support/ET_16 . There are two download links for each of these: the left column has files served from Hong Kong, and the right column has files served from Panama. The Panama links might be faster for US customers. The software installation package is over 400 MB, so it'll take a while to download.

Run the installation program. You'll have to enter the 25-character code from the label on the bottom of your scanner.

Once your software is downloaded and installed, plug in your scanner to power and your computer. I used the USB connection to my computer, and attached the foot pedal for photo triggering. Power on the Czur using the switch on the back. The LED illumination level can be controlled by the topmost button on the scanner itself — I chose the brightest of two possible illumination levels.

Scanning Software

Here's a walkthrough of scanning a book with the "Czur scanner" software:

First you'll be presented with this dialog. Click the left icon, "Scanner" to scan. The right icon is for some kind of overhead projector functionality.

Next, if you've already used the software before, you'll likely see this "Still have images not paging, do it now?" dialog. Click "Cancel" to continue:

OK, here's the main interface. The three icons on the toolbar at the upper-left provide the main functionality. My workflow is:

• Scan - first, scan all your book pages
• To PDF - then save your book as PDF

The Bulk icon provides functionality for making changes to multiple pages after scanning, but isn't normally necessary.

Scanning

On the main Czur toolbar at the upper-left is the "Scan" button, but if you look closely you'll find a tiny down-arrow icon underneath. Before scanning, click on this arrow to select your image format. The default image format is unaltered photographs, complete with all the shading and shadows. You'll probably want to remove these distortions, and have clean white-background pages like a photocopier provides. I usually pick "B&W" for monochrome books, but for color books you may optionally want to choose "Seal". With either of these options, any images in your books will appear washed out, but the text will be much more readable.

OK, now you're ready to scan. Click the "Scan" button on the toolbar at the upper-left. You'll get the following dialog. Select "Books" to let the software automatically curved flatten book pages. For book pages with large images — which confuse this Czur page flattening algorithm — you might want to select "Single" instead.

Place your book on the provided black pad under your scanner. You can hold your book open with your fingers. The Czur software will usually manage to erase the images of your fingers from the resulting image. Czur provides two stylish yellow silicone thumb thimbles (called "special fingerstall") you can wear for extra page-grabbing traction.

While holding the book pages open — there's no need for them to be flat, press the photo trigger button. I use the foot pedal, but there's also a hand remote provided, or you can use the camera-icon button on the Czur scanner itself, or in the software. I find that using the foot pedal is the only way I can hold the book open with both my thumbs.

You'll see three red laser lines projected onto your book as the scan takes place.

Repeat. I find I can scan a pair of pages every few seconds this way. After a delay of a few seconds, you'll start seeing a list of your incoming scanned images on the right on your computer: "image0001.jpg", "image0002.jpg", etc. There's no need to wait for these to appear before scanning more pages.

You don't have to scan your whole book at once — you can pause to check that the scans look good, and come back to continue at any time.

When you're ready to pause — or if you've scanned your whole book, click the "X" at the upper-right corner of the window to exit scanning mode.

Check

Let's see what you have! Your pages are listed at the right, and you can click on individual pages to see the scans. Unfortunately, I don't see any way to easily scroll through all your pages sequentially to review your whole scanned book. You must click each page one at a time. This is a major shortcoming! You can re-scan any botched scans you find by clicking on "Re" below the page item.

NOTE: If you find your page scans are all garbled like in the image below, it might be caused by a nearby fluorescent lamp! I was finding that about a quarter of my scans were getting convoluted like this, and it took me much trial-and-error to figure out that the Czur scanner was getting confused by my fluorescent desk lamp. The solution: turn off your fluorescent lights! Try to rely on the Czur's built-in LED lights for illumination. I predict that sunlight or incandescent background light won't incur this problem (caused by 60 Hz flicker, I presume).

Save to PDF

Before saving your book to a PDF file, you first need to select all your scanned images. At the lower-right corner of your window, click the word "All". This brings up checkboxes for all your images, and selects them all. You can also unselect them all by clicking "REV", or manually work with the checkboxes.

Once you scanned page images are selected, click the "To PDF" icon button at upper-left on the main screen.

You'll see "PDF", "1L PDF", "2L PDF" choices appear to the right on the main toolbar. Select "2L PDF". This means two-layer PDF, where your PDF file will contain the original page images together with the recognized text. You will be able to select this text in your PDF reader software, or search for keywords.

The Czur software will then ask what language to use for OCR (automatic text recognition). I select "English" and then press "Confirm":

Finally, navigate to your preferred folder and enter a file name for the saved PDF file. Click "Save" and wait while your book is processed and saved into a PDF file!

When this is done it's safe to quit the Czur scanner software. I find it easiest between books to simply quit the software and restart.

Finally, I use Adobe Acrobat to tweak my resulting PDF file, in case some pages are duplicated or out of order, etc.

There you go, you book is now a searchable PDF file. Have fun!