Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
It would be cheaper, faster and more effective than camera if you took the book to a good photocopy machine. They already output the image on 8.5x11 or A4 paper, already suited for sheetfed scanners, and cost less than photo output to film (or even paper).
If you go this route, use a photocopier with a zoom control. Increase the zoom until your book page literally fills the photocopy image. Then you'll have the largest-possible text images on paper, which will run perfectly through a sheetfed scanner, be easier for the OCR to recognize, and reduce your reco errors.
Copying the book page by page will also be faster than doing the same with a camera, then outputting the camera image.
|
It will be cheaper only if you use an office copier for your private copying (no investment and no running cost for you). It will be faster only if your secretary does the copying. Your workflow will not reproduce color images well enough, even with a color copier. Increasing the zoom beyond a certain limit will spoil the OCR rather than improve it. The advice from Finereader is not to manipulate the images unless you have to. If you flatten a book with the copier cover you get curved lines of text and you damage the book to some extent.
With my camera I can take photos of documents every 3 seconds or so. No copier can match that. Results are good enough for OCR. High quality repro requires a little more than a camera. See my thread
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13848