User:Branko
Hi there, and welcome to my page.
Project management
- Why my books have extra proofreading rules. (English and Dutch)
Howtos
How I ...
Press services
Planetary scanner
A planetary scanner (also called orbital scanner) is a document scanner that hangs over a book (codex). The advantage is that a book can be kept open in a way that does not damage its spine. A lot of planetary scanners have as an added feature that they do not use a moving scan head, but instead use a camera photographing a page in a single shot. They therefore tend to be significantly faster than flatbed scanners.
For most DP volunteers commercial planetary scanners will be out of financial reach: the cheapest one I know of costs 5000 USD, excluding the cameras. However, it may be possible to build your own planetary scanner. After all, they are little more than a stand, a couple of lights, a couple of cameras, and a pc. In other words, a planetary scanner could conceivably be cobbled together from off-the-shelf parts that you have in your home now.
Modern digital compact cameras are cheap yet good enough to be used in DIY scanners. I experimented a little with building such a scanner, though my ineptness as a DIY-er has so far failed me. Nevertheless, my experiments may have taught me a thing or two that it would be worthwhile to pass on (well, one thing really: lights, lights, lights).
By now others have taken up the torch of creating cheap planetary scanners from off-the-shelf components, and the most important link in this section may be the following: www.diybookscanner.org. This is a project that tells you not just of experiments, but also of an actual, working DIY scanner.
- memo to self: Google's magic formula is "pc controlled digital camera"
- useful digital cameras as per December 2006
- PS620 settings
- Some experiments with lighting
- book cradle howto (PDF) and blogpost
- Idea for an inverse planetary scanner (SVG)
Public Domain Days
Each year January 1 is international Public Domain Day. This is the day when books in countries that have a Life+XX copyright regime return to the public domain.
Other
- My dirty scanning tricks
- Flatten, BW, Save, a GIMP script
- Publishing scans at the Internet Archive
- DP Mark-up Essay
- Book list
- Example of the feedback archive.org produces during the creation of derivatives
- User:Branko is too lazy to learn how to write shell scripts, so he wrote himself a batch file creator.
Notes
(Memos to self)
