DIY Book Scanner

daniel_reetz wrote:I really need to email Ian from the BKRPR group again. A book scanner with cameras mounted on the platen would represent a kind of hardware middleground for our designs.

Yeah, it's too bad they don't have a forum there, the lack of one severely limits collaboration.

In theory, I expect I'll want the "film plane" of the camera to parallel the "page plane" of the book it's photographing, so I'm currently planning on using a couple of angle brackets to give me the same 45-degree pitch the sides of the platen will have. bracket.jpg But your "fixed so they don't mov...

ImageMagick (the free open-source application I'm currently using to crop and rotate my JPGs and convert them to PDFs, though I may soon be using FineReader or Rob's software) will do this easily: convert page1.jpg -negate npage1.jpg If you're planning to do OCR, you may want to do that first; I'm n...

And welcome to (I assume) another Pynchon fan. I may have mentioned elsewhere that I bought my ScanSnap when one of my paperback copies of Gravity's Rainbow fell apart. I still have several hardcopies, including a hardback first edition. I haven't (so far) found that I needed real-time video output,...

On my "manual" platen (not attached to anything), I sometimes hit one of the cameras as I pulled it out of the way. Now, I'm just aware of that possibility, and extra careful. That shouldn't be a problem when I build 2.0, because I'm planning to have the cameras attached to the platen frame. I wonde...

Yeah, the dates in the FineReader 5 that was installed are all 2000 and (January) 2001. I found a patch on the Abbyy site which listed a "FineReader shell" abend on startup, but applying that patch didn't fix the problem on either of the two machines I tried it on. The funny thing is, one of those m...

I used ABBYY 5.0 express for years and was extremely happy with it. So much so that I just started sending the text straight to a text file without proofing. Sure, there were errors, but it was easy enough to figure out and when you get absorbed in a great book it's rea11y easy to flgure out what's...

Just curious - what can you do with a laser cutter that you can't do with some other tool (like a good jigsaw, for example)? Is it mainly used to cut armor plating, or perform self-cauterizing surgery, or what?

Thanks, I'll go grab Leptonica and get to work. If you're planning to create the all-Java version by porting Leptonica routines into Java, and you think the work can be divided among several developers, I'd be happy to help. I'm somewhat familiar with image processing, and coded some routines myself...

Like most scanners, this one comes bundled with OCR software. I think they're including some (probably stripped-down) version of Omnipage.