Quote:
Originally Posted by AJ Starr
I have been looking at a portable double sided ASF scanner, a Brother 720D, lately, but haven't purchased it yet. It would necessitate taking my pbs apart and scanning page by page. Does anyone have one?
|
If you don't mind destroying your books... I would go the feed scanner route over a typical scanner.
It is MUCH faster (and the important thing is you can go do other things while it scans). They do get jammed up every once in a while (especially if you cut the binding, there might be glue, or "flakes" of paper sticking together), so I would still be in the vicinity just in case something goes awry.
And also you should be sure to double-check that all of the page numbers are in the correct order, and that no pages got stuck to eachother while going through.
We typically fed them in piles of 15-20 or so pages (if I recall correctly, it has been a few years since I scanned a book), and then we would double-check the output was correct before feeding the next pile of pages. Doing it in batches like that will save you headaches in the long-run.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Your method will certainly produce a good reading copy. What it won't do - and this is very important - is find missing text. You'd probably be surprised how many books I've proof-read where the scanner has missed text at the top or the bottom of the page, or even completely missed out a double page of text, and it's not always at all obvious from simply reading the text that this has taken place.
|
Yes yes, that is another thing to keep in mind when OCRing. The OCR programs typically compute a "box" around the text, and sometimes they mess up badly for who knows why.
Usually this is noticed in one of the "multiple passes" stage. Chances are VERY HIGH that you catch a missing chunk while double-checking/looking for all those other common errors. I am typically searching/flip-flopping back/forth between EPUB/Finereader, just double-checking spelling, hyphenation, missing punctuation, "is this an actual error/typo", and things like that.
Of course, there can always be that freak perfect storm!
I should actually jot that one down in my notes though, thanks for bringing it up HarryT.
