DIY Book Scanner

When I say "simple text" I mean the file consists entirely of letters, numbers, and punctuation, with none of the special formatting characters one might find in a file created by a word processing program like (for example) Microsoft Word. Check out CHDK Goodies for the grid script and the timer sc...

To the best of my recollection, I have never edited the CHDK configuration file directly. I loaded my time-lapse shutter control script by choosing "Scripting Parameters" from the main menu on the CHDK display, and then "Load script from file." My custom grid was loaded from the Grid menu under OSD ...

I see by the other thread that you got your time lapse problem resolved. I have never used SDM, so I can't help you with SDM questions except where SDM and CHDK overlap. I will say that I use CHDK for two things: time-lapse triggering and a custom screen display that assists me with lining up the bo...

If your camera doesn't support manual focus, you may be able to get the autofocus to work by sticking a post-it note with a thick square drawn in magic marker in the middle of the page you're photographing. That's usually where the autofocus default tries to focus, and it usually fails because there...

I'm not at all familiar with Mac software, but I think it would help if you clarify how you're planning to use your database. If you're hoping to find instances of a single word or phrase to use for research, keeping an entire book in a PDF will be most convenient: the PDF reader will do the search ...

Thanks for sharing this. Right now, I'm most interested in the "line straightening" portions of his process, but at some point I may want to investigate the other parts (like OCR). I have quite a few historical books in the pipeline.

bookPanda wrote:Just wondering has anyone here attempted [...] a scanner that does not require a V-shaped glass to press against the pages but with other types of mechanisms to hold the pages down in place.

Does this count?

There have been a couple of single camera designs using a pivoting platen/book, but I'm not aware of one using a pivoting camera that's actually been built. http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=175 http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=925 And I think this might ...

Are you displaying the zoom level on your CHDK screen? I set mine to display ages ago, and don't want to look up how to do it now, but it's done using one of the standard CHDK menus. It's possible to set zoom level using a CHDK script, but in my experience (again, a long time ago) it didn't really w...

Most folks here use Scan Tailor or Book Scan Wizard to process the JPEG images into something that can be turned into an ebook. I still prefer PDF for that, but I'm told DJVU is also popular. Scan Tailor is good for separating a book's text from its images, which will result in better compression. I...