Feed Scanners: Scanning in art, books, etc

[Fe 26]

This might not be the best place for this but I figured TNL's art community probably understands scanners the best.

Does anyone have any opinions on feed scanners? I did some searches and all of the old threads are long dead.

http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/threads/48730-Feed-Scanners
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/threads/35842-Best-Scanner-for-Scanning-Artwork
http://www.the-nextlevel.com/tnl/threads/37725-I-need-a-scanner

I'm thinking about getting one of the following Fujitsu fi-5015C Dual Feed Scanner or HP Scanjet 7650.

I'm probably going to be scanning in old books to share online and magazines that take up too much space. For software I was going to look into PaperPort Professional. Drew or someone might know of something better for translating books into pdfs.

I'd really like to set up a system where I can make professional PDFs that I can search quickly and copy text out of (an example of what I want to make).

[cigsthecat]

Are you going to take the books and magazines apart?

I have a Brother MFC-6490CW that I bought because it is huge (does A3) and a feed scanner for a sweet price. I think it's out of production now, but it is rad. I bought it to be able to drop a stack on animation into, and it's great for that, and just scanning large artwork in general.

I don't know about pdf software, but I'll bet you could get most of it done with PS and some simple actions.

[FuryFox]

I have that same scanner/printer (its large-scale printing can be very helpful as well), and it really optimized my workflow. I haven't ever used a feed scanner though.

That software seems adequate for OCR and PDF generation.

[Fe 26]

Are you going to take the books and magazines apart?

yeah. Most likely. That is something else I'm looking into.

I don't really want to rip my books up. But some of the stuff I own, needs to be online. And if I could get some good OCR software and get these massive tomes to be searchable, it would be worth it in the end.

I'm wondering how big of a pain it will be to unbind rebind these field manuals I have. A few of them are pretty rare. I could probably get 5$ each for pdf copies of the vehicle ones. I've got a 450+ page book coming in on the Atomic Anne http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M65_Atomic_Cannon

I figure something like that would be worth something to model builders, seeing as there isn't a lot of documentation on it that is easily accessible.

[Fe 26]

This is my first attempt(s). I used an old standalone scanner and photoshop to capture the images. Then I ran them through OmniPage 18 and did a little bit of editing to the OCR produced text. The final result is usable and searchable. The OCR ability of OmniPage was pretty good. It can scan a page in a few seconds. It got all of the normal words, and it will show you each word it has problems with. It botched some of the number formatting, but that was easy enough to fix.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/4135937/IC%20Guitar%20Amp.pdf

Things I'm not happy with:

-MCR compression makes the text crisp, but the letters are not level (so I decided to not use it).
-Not enough compression features in OmniPage. You get None, Mid, and best. Best looks like shit. Mid is usable. None resulted in a 6 mb file, but looked good.
-I could not find a tab to force text wrap when you copy it out of the pdf. Text copies exactly like it is in the article.
-I could not find an option to create a table of contents on the side of the pdf, or a way to create links (like being able to click "page 8" in table of contents and then go straight to page 8).

Does anyone have any advice on how to get the best scan of old material like this? I have a lot of old stuff like this to scan. As you can see, it is mostly black with a couple very flat primaries.

I've attached the original images if it would help anyone give advice on getting better images to start with.

[cigsthecat]

I did a quick brightness/contrast/sharpen pass with PS. I've blown out the color a bit, but you could easily take a little more time for a subtler result and then create an action that you could apply to all your files.

-edit: not sure why but TNL won't upload this file.

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/6043/better2.jpg

[Fe 26]

I did a quick brightness/contrast/sharpen pass with PS. I've blown out the color a bit, but you could easily take a little more time for a subtler result and then create an action that you could apply to all your files.

-edit: not sure why but TNL won't upload this file.

http://img716.imageshack.us/img716/6043/better2.jpg

Thanks.

So I need to adjust the brightness/contrast/sharpeness? Does PS now have a tool for that or do I still need to go in and manually do it? (I'm using a 5-7 year old copy of the software :I )

Does PS or anyone else make a tool to take scan pages and align them better? (put everything at 90 degrees)

[GohanX]

I'm no expert, but I just use the rotate command and set it at .5 degrees or so, and use a horizontal guide to see if a line of text is even.

[Fe 26]

This didn't come up while googleing for book scanners. It came up today while googling for library book scanning techniques.

ANYWAY

It is possible to scan books without cutting/ruining the binding. I think they make multi thousand dollar units to do it, but some guys started an online project around building home made scanners.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/...-book-scanner/

pdf on how to build it

http://diybookscanner.org/PDF/DIY-Hi...nd-Cheap-C.pdf

and the website dedicated to the project

http://www.diybookscanner.org/

and a video for those that are lazy

fun stuff