User:Branko/My dirty scanning tricks

I figured if there was one task that would not require much time to break into, it would be scanning. After all, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to turn over a book on a scanner plate. Well, I figured wrong.

And I am glad too. The first time I was scanning a book I had a horrible time. The damn process took way to long.

It still takes a long time, but now I take short cuts.

Tip 1: Settings matter. Spend some time to get to know your scanner and your scanner software. Seemingly innocuous settings can cut down on scanning time, whilst highly relevant looking settings do not make a difference at all. For instance, on my scanner it doesn't really make a difference in scanning speed whether I change the Preview settings from high resolution full-colour to low-resolution b/w, but it does matter if I change these settings for the "final" scan.

Tip 2: Do not preview each scan. Just use the same selection every time you make a new scan. Find out if your scanner software allows this.

Tip 3: Scanner software differs per OS. This I found out at my part-time job, an ad agency that does a lot of studio work in-house. The same scanner (Agfa) delivered beautiful scans on a PC, and lousy ones on the Mac. Oddly enough, our other scanner (an HP) had the exact same problem, but the other way around. If I hadn't tested this myself, I would never have believed it. Even though the HP produced superior results, our studio personel had always preferred the Agfa, since they had always had it hooked up to a spare PC. Now they hook up the HP to their Macs.

Tip 3b: Scanner software tends to want to think for you in all the wrong areas. For instance, my HP software came preset to sharpen its results. Huh?! I'd like to decide these things for myself.

Tip 4: Deprecated. If you have two PCs, put them close together, so that you can clean up images on the one while the scanner is running on the other. Edit: I now do all processing afterwards; I found it is too confusing for me to keep switching between scanning and processing modes.

Tip 5: While doing clean-up, the GIMP's "corrective" rotation mode is a real time saver. Just align the grid with the text and press the button.

Tip 6: I now do all image processing afterwards, in the GIMP. The part that can be automated I have automated. It's still a lot of work. (New: see Tip 9.)

Tip 7: The way I figure it, the more work you can do automatically, the more work I take out of the hands of the proofreaders, the faster the book progresses through the rounds, the happier every one ends up. See my check list for things I look at.

Tip 8: I always leave some 'dirt' on the thresholded blank pages, so that proofreaders can tell that the scan displays correctly on their systems.

Tip 9 (new!): one of the spin-off products of the DIY Book Scanner project seems to be the brilliant Scan Tailor software (cross-platform) which actually does cut the post processing in half for the sort of books we work on here at PGDP. Highly recommended.