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Re: Softalk Magazine

Scott Alfter wrote:

In article <zOCMj.10952$682.9980@edtnps90>,
Jerry  <SNIPawanderin@yahoSNIPo.ca> wrote:


I use a home-built cradle for books so the books lays open about 30 degrees



from flat.  Its face is painted flat-black so that pages are always



surrounded by black.  Then, using a digital camera and a piece of glass to
press the pages flat, I can scan a couple hundred pages in half an hour. 

This reminds me of the machine for capturing books.  It opens the book
a little more than 90 degrees, and uses two cameras to capture the two
pages.  There's a fairly simple mechanism for turning pages, based on
suction, I believe, and very gentle.


Sounds interesting...only problems I can see are (1) it'd take an ~8.5 MP
camera to get somewhere near 300 dpi and (2) you'd probably want lossless
images (TIFF or RAW) from your camera for further processing.  Mine does
TIFF, but 3 MP isn't likely to capture enough detail for OCR.

(Then again, you can probably get a 10 MP camera now for no more than I
spent a few years back for 3...maybe even less.)


In fact, you'll have a hard time finding anything under 7MP--even the
sub-$200 cameras.

And OCR works pretty well with 200-300 dpi--as if anyone is actually
getting good results from OCR on technical manuals...  It's good enough
to facilitate searching, but not nearly good enough to replace the page
images--unless you're willing to spend *serious* time proofreading.

WRT lossless imaging, I've found that good .jpg's (I know, I know)
at high resolution work fine for getting the image into the computer,
then contrast enhancement and (especially) dropping out the paper
texture really cleans up the image.  It can then be saved as a .GIF
or whatever you want.

Proper attention to lighting uniformity saves a lot of postprocessing
work.  ;-)

-michael

NadaPong: Network game demo for Apple II computers!
Home page:  http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it's seriously underused."