Scanners

[Erik]

This may be a little off-topic, but. . .

Part of my collection is document related. I have dozens of manuals, sales brochures, books and magazines, some of which I would like to scan and make available on the web (via vintage-computer.com)

I have a couple of page scanners here, but they are slow and clunky, especially when working with bound materials.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could scan some of this stuff and make it useful for others?

Thanks,

Erik

 

[CP/M User]

Re: Scanners

"Erik" wrote in message:

Hi Erik,

> This may be a little off-topic, but. . .

> Part of my collection is document related. I have dozens of
> manuals, sales brochures, books and magazines, some of
> which I would like to scan and make available on the web.

> I have a couple of page scanners here, but they are slow
> and clunky, especially when working with bound materials.

> Does anyone have any suggestions on how I could scan
> some of this stuff and make it useful for others?

Do you have any drivers available for the scanner? If you're
using Windows, then it may come with the drivers. But I've
only ever seen Windows supplying the Printer Drivers.

I don't have any scanners myself, but have occasionally
used them in programs like PhotoShop. However, I've
only used them in the Graphical sense. I haven't done
any OCRing or anything like that.

My second suggestion maybe to try Gaby Chaudry who I
know uses scanners for documents, so maybe she could
help you there. Her e-mail is mailto:gaby@gaby.de
It maybe a long shot, but if you already have the
drivers for the scanner & just need to know to do OCR
some text via the scanner, then Gaby maybe able to
help.

Cheers.

 

[Erik]

With the scanners I have I'm pretty much able to do what I want, only very very slowly.

I think the faster of my scanners does about 1.5 minutes per page. That's way too slow to scan most materials.

I probably need to find a document scanner specifically for doing large scans of text with minimal graphics.

That still won't solve my magazine problem. How does one scan magazines without ruining the bindings?

Erik

 

[CP/M User]

"Erik" wrote in message:

> With the scanners I have I'm pretty much able to do what I want,
> only very very slowly.

> I think the faster of my scanners does about 1.5 minutes per
> page. That's way too slow to scan most materials.

It just seems like the scanners you have aren't able to do what
you want to do. In other words, there perhaps more specifically
designed to scan in just the odd thing.
However, I could be wrong in suggesting that. For example I
have a Cannon printer which took a long time to print anything (particuilarly in Colour) on my 386 computer (which had
Win3.1 running on it at the time). This took minutes before
anything would happen, but once it did the printer was up &
away. I don't know if adding more memory to your computer
will help, it may just be the parallel port it's running on.

The only other example I can say is in relation to my Dot
Matrix printer that I'm running in Win95. It's slower to
print out in that, than in DOS. Unfortunately I don't know
of any DOS programs used in conjunction with scanning
(Gaby might know though). It's just a matter of having
some drivers which are available in DOS. But if it's DOS
you're using, then I'm afraid it's just the scanner.

> I probably need to find a document scanner specifically for doing
> large scans of text with minimal graphics.

They do exist. Gaby should be able to point you to some.
Scanning out graphics is a time-consuming thing, so I
wouldn't be suprised if text is must quicker. The downside
to scanning text (I think), is you might have to go though
the document to check for anything the scanners has
scanned in incorrectly.

> That still won't solve my magazine problem. How does one
> scan magazines without ruining the bindings?

Well, again I'm afraid I don't know, sorry! If you had a hand
held scanner you could just open the book up & scan the
pages in though that. Photocopying the magazine is just like
using a scanner & your just as likely to damage the binding.

Regards.

 

[kepla]

Re: Scanning magaznes without damaging the binding.
I guess it depends on how they are bound ! I am currently going through the process of scanning in tons of docs. Most magazines and manuals are either stapled or cord-bound. I have a flat bed scanner, so they can be made to sit flat on the glass. With glue-bound docs there is a problem. You either have to bend the pages instead of the binding - which leaves a book which won't stay closed flat - or bend firmly at the binding and live with the fact that some will be disturbed. Hot-glue binding can be re-stuck by putting it into a hot binding machine, but the stringy rubber set-glue cannot.
Fortunately, I have found that the binder-side margin is normally broad enough to be able to put most books or magazines onto the scanner glass, held down with a moderate weight, leaving a small enough amount of distortion in the scan for OCR software to cope okay. I am trying to convert some old manuals into OCR documents and find that modern OCR software does a pretty good job. The biggest hassle is the diagrams. I don't want to end up with bitmaps as the size is enormous and quality not brilliant, but haven't yet found any diagramming software which can translate images of diagrams into graphics vectors. What I need is ODR (optical diagram recognition) software - does any exist ?

 

[mwb]

This might not be quite the answer you're looking for but- for a few pages from a magazine- you could use one of the newer USB scanners by Canon. They're VERY small and thin (a couple of other companies make them that size too). You can put the scanner at the edge of a table and let the magazine page that's not being scanned just hang over the edge. My wife's scanner only has like a quarter inch edge around the glass. It cuts out the distortion from being flattened as in a regular scanner. Like I said- this would still only be good for a few pages because it's still slow, but you could scan more than a page a minute. Good for that "you've got to see this article!" situations.

 

[Erik]

I did do some scanning recently that gave me some ideas but I need some time to pursue them more.

Basically I wanted to scan some old bound manuals (similar binding to magazines) so I used a regular copier to duplicate them, page by page, onto individual sheets. I then used the sheet feeder on my scanner to scan in the pages.

That works fine for B&W stuff, but I'd be unable to do color scans. . .

Erik

 

[CP/M User]

"Erik" wrote in message:

> I did do some scanning recently
> that gave me some ideas but I
> need some time to pursue them
> more.

> Basically I wanted to scan some
> old bound manuals (similar
> binding to magazines) so I used a
> regular copier to duplicate them,
> page by page, onto individual
> sheets. I then used the sheet
> feeder on my scanner to scan in
> the pages.

> That works fine for B&W stuff, but
> I'd be unable to do color scans. . .

Yes that was my experience when I
first started playing with Scanners
on the Macs. Forunately my work
consisted it very little colour!

Sadily, as you stated earlier they
weren't exactly fast! :-(

 

[Peet42]

Scanners

Erik,
You say you would like to scan colour stuff... But is that essential?

The reason older scanners are so damn slow is that they have a single-line monochrome CCD, and rotate three different colour filters in front of it as they are scanning. In effect you scan the page three times! If your driver gives you a greyscale option, try it - I suspect you'll find it only takes about a third of the time to scan a full page. Also, for the purposes of creating a PDF of a manual to stick on the web, 200DPI is more than adequate; many of these drivers default to the scanner's maximum resolution (300dpi? 600dpi?) while 200DPI is about 60% more resolution than a "fine" fax, and because it's greyscale rather than monochrome carries much more visual information. For text-only documents, 150DPI is fine; "Letter Quality" dot-matrix printers were only 144DPI, and they were perfectly legible!