Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Busby Scan

[David Buchner <buchner@wcta.net>]

On Sunday, October 26, 2003, at 01:14 PM, jbarlow@bjservices.ca wrote:
> I am volunteering my scanner and time to this project.  If the Acrobat 
> does
> a passible job I can get that too to OCR it.
> If there is a conseus as to format......  I don't know enough about it 
> to
> be sure but I think GIF is good.  I have heard about the "lossy"
> compression of JPG before, though I won't pretend to know how the
> compression algorithms work for either.

Flipping through my copy, I find it hard to imagine these pictures 
would suffer from JPGing. But if the eventual goal is either printing 
OR putting it on the web (or both), wouldn't the PDF format make more 
sense anyway? From the little I know about it, this format allows for 
still treating the text as text (and therefore searching) -- and must 
be more easily translatable to usable HTML. Of course, I know even less 
about the creation of those files -- if they have to start out as scans 
saved as JPGs or TIFFs or whatever and then be converted, nevermind and 
please excuse my thickness.

> My scanner is a  flatbed not a mystery machine, though we have a Colour
> Photocopier / printer at work which
> really a scanner mated with a colour laser printer.  I wonder if the
> output could be re-directed from the printer to simply save a file for 
> each
> page.  It is duplex too so if it can it would eat up the "sliced 
> Busby".  I
> will ask about that Monday.

That sounds so cool. I've been reading science fiction my whole life, 
and frequently find myself impatient that technology STILL hasn't 
caught up to some obviously useful functionality which can be 
extrapolated from all the elements that already exist.

About the single-sided-ness: I wonder whether it would be feasible to 
run the stack of pages through once and save as files -- and then flip 
over and do the other sides -- and then somehow cut the whole deck back 
together, as it were? Some way to assign all those PDF's odd page 
numbers on the first pass, then even on the second? I'm totally 
guessing here, as my only experience is with my tiny, slow scanner 
perched on the edge of the desk and trying to hold books on it and not 
have the whole mess crash to the floor, and spilled drinks, and...

Is this fine, smooth paper the book is printed on going to cause 
problems for a sheet feeder?