processing scanned data into nice pdfs.

[axel77]

Originally Posted by -Thomas-

Hey Axel,

thanks for new script, I'll give it a try as soon as I have to e another p-book.

I'm glad we have some really fast scanning/copying units standing in our university; scanning a page is about 3 times faster than with a usual scanner at home. Scanning a ~250 page book took me only about 30 minutes to scan.

I'm already thinking about a way to create a GUI for it. Generally I would just show up a dialog for the rectangle selection and the convert parameters, giving a preview for both. After setting the appropriate options I would feed them to the script to do the processing steps... do you have any other brainstorming ideas?

I heared my university (vienna) actually developed a device for auto-scanning books, that turns pages with an air stream, they use it for extra-precious books because it is less strain the book as when turned by hand. However I don't think they will let me access it, or want to process me my books So I'm bound to my desktop CANON Scanner.

Edit: But now that I think of it... Actually the copy service devices can scan too and are pretty fast. However AFAIK they charge for it as much as if you would print the page, but I'll check, thanks for that idea.

About the GUI, what language have you thought of? Interface, I thought it ideally would allow you to specify rectangles per page, that is on the left it shows thumbs of the pages, when you do the rectangles on the first page, it will automatically apply them to all following, but it allows you to move downward and move them on some pages... like some scans are sometimes a bit off... Language, has java all features we would need? It has at least GUI, image support and I heared pdf support also. Another crazy idea would be web-based (GWT?) application, where the processing is actually done on the server... one *can* draw rectangles with javascript/GWT (which are actually 4 divs).. I could offer one virtual host for such a service. but otherwise I'd go with everything you feel comfortable with

[-Thomas-]

Originally Posted by axel77

About the GUI, what language have you thought of? Interface, I thought it ideally would allow you to specify rectangles per page, that is on the left it shows thumbs of the pages, when you do the rectangles on the first page, it will automatically apply them to all following, but it allows you to move downward and move them on some pages... like some scans are sometimes a bit off... Language, has java all features we would need? It has at least GUI, image support and I heared pdf support also.

I think Java would be a good choice as there are many open libraries around on the net (e.g. JIU for image manipulation, pdf-renderer etc). And of course it would be platform independent. I like the idea about the selection of desired sections, sounds nice.

Another crazy idea would be web-based (GWT?) application, where the processing is actually done on the server... one *can* draw rectangles with javascript/GWT (which are actually 4 divs).. I could offer one virtual host for such a service. but otherwise I'd go with everything you feel comfortable with

I think a virtual host wouldn't be enough as of CPU and memory utilization. And of course you have to think of the copyright issues that might arise if you deal with other people's PDF files... I'm clearly in favor of the Java application :-)

Anyway, I've already set up a project at the Mobileread Dev Hub. I called the project PDF Scissors

[hidari]

Vuescan is a great progam. I have it myself. Also..there is another program for free batch conversion:

http://www.faststone.org/

I use faststone myself. Great program ....

Originally Posted by dcalder

Two options come to mind, one free and the other not.

The free option (for Windows only) would be Irfanview. Its batch conversion option can be used to crop to specified coordinates, rotate, etc, and it can automatically name the resulting files based on a template. One pass through your files would give you the "odd" pages and a second, with a different set of cropping coordinates, would give you the "even" pages.

The commercial software that I'd recommend is Vuescan, from Hamrick Software, is available for Windows, Mac OS-X, and Linux. Despite its name, it isn't just for use with scanners - it will treat files from disk as if they were from a scanner. Assuming that your files are of uniform size, you can set the area you want it to "scan" on one file and tell it to process the whole directory, naming the resulting files automatically. You could definitely do two runs through the files, one for odd pages and a second for even pages, but I think you might also be able to use the multi-crop option to get both pages in one pass through the files. The only catch here is that I don't think Vuescan supports PNG so you might have to convert to TIFF or JPEG to process the files (Irfanview will easily batch-convert files).

I love my Vuescan Professional software; I use it to scan everything to either RAW TIFF or DNG (digital negative) format, then use Vuescan again at a later date to process the raw files to produce a multi-page PDF or whatever I need. It's a truly outstanding piece of software with exceptionally good licensing terms (you get the right to install it on up to three computers for a very reasonable fee).