User:FallenArchangel/My CP Process.
I follow this guide:
Monicas wicked stepmother Content Providing and Project Managing Workflow
I have made only one slight change over time, in the use of Scan Tailor. The guide suggests 5mm margins and I have changed that to 3mm margins.
We want some margins, but any more than some is a waste. It takes the same amount of time to do it either way, but for books with small dense text, the more space given to the text than to pointless empty margin space, the clearer and easier the text is to read. We want the text to be as easy and clear to read as we can for the proofreaders and formatters in the rounds.
For many books that small change will not make much difference. For books with small/dense text it does make a difference. Using the smaller margin option all the time means less to have to remember when a harder book with smaller text comes along.
There's one other thing which I do differently to the guide aside from the 5mm->3mm margins. That is the output section of the ST (Scan Tailor) process. I didn't change that though. The guide changed. What I do used to be the norm in the guide. What the guide now does was formerly a special set of instructions for difficult/tricky pages with stains and age marks etc. What the guide describes works fine. However I think it is a little harder at least at the start to get that working right. In particular newcomers tend to have problems with the gamma correction part I find. My way (the former way the guide suggested) is simpler and in most cases all that is needed. Especially if one is selective about the source image scan sets one selects.
In the output section, instead of using colour, I set it to black and white. At the bottom is a setting for despeckling, which should be turned off (leftmost button option) and applied to all pages. Under the black and white selection is an option of thinner/thicker. This can darken the text and make it much clearer. Like reinking a faded page as though freshly printed. Sliding the slider all the way to the right will darken the text output. Sometimes sliding it all the way to the right will be too much and will start to introduce splotching and noise, so we need to then slide it back a little. There's a little trial and error with that, but once you get output which looks good then that can be applied to all pages. With many books I am able to just slide that option all the way to the right and the text darkens nicely and becomes clearer.
The same can be done via the way the guide describes, using the gamma correction option mentioned there, but that tends to be a trickier thing to do if people aren't familiar with it. I let ST deal with it. Tricky pages/sources are another story and then something like what the guide describes becomes necessary, but that is more work. I get that it is good to have one single process for all cases, as that means less to remember. I agree with that a lot. Though in this case it really tends to be a relatively rare need for the special handling.
The Irfanview batch of the ST output just changes the width to the wanted 1000px and then sets the colour depth to 2. ST already sets the colour depth to 2, but resizing in Irfanview causes it to change the colour depth, so it needs to be changed back down to the wanted 2. There's an option in the bottom right of those batch options in Irfanview to make sure those batch steps happen in the right order (letting one move the steps up and down in the order as needed so that the resizing is done before the colour reduction).