Aperture Card Scanning and Indexing

Yes. The punch data is the whole reason aperture cards are worth converting rather than simply reshooting. Capturing it turns decades of cataloging work into ready-made index fields, so your digital drawing set arrives already organized by drawing number, revision, and whatever else the cards encode.

Card formats were never fully standardized, so we read a sample against your legend before running the file and confirm the fields map the way you expect. Where cards were also typed or stamped along the top edge, that text can be captured too. Index data is delivered as an Excel or comma-delimited file for import into your PLM or document management system.

Better than most people expect. A well-shot card from a crisp original produces a readable full-size drawing, with dimensions and title block legible on screen and in print. The digital image inherits whatever the camera captured, so the quality ceiling was set decades ago when the card was made.

Cards shot from a faded blue-line print, or ones scratched from years of sorting, come through weaker, and capture settings can only recover so much. We evaluate a representative handful before quoting and tell you what to expect rather than discovering it at delivery. Output is typically TIFF or PDF, your choice, with no proprietary viewer required.

No. High volume is the normal shape of an aperture card project, and we have scanned over 100 million pages since 1998 across every format a Carolina business has walked in with. Large card files are processed in defined batches so you get usable drawings as the project moves rather than everything at the end.

There is no long-term contract, so a first batch can serve as a working pilot and you decide about the rest afterward. When the cards themselves are no longer needed, we destroy them securely under a Certificate of Destruction, which matters if the drawings are proprietary. Call (704) 351-0949 for a quote.