DIY Book Scanner

Extracting text from PDF files: If only the OCR text is required -- and not the word positions on the page as would be required for a searchable image of the page -- it can be exported by simply selecting the text, copying to the clipboard, and pasting into a text editor or word processor... Ctrl +...

I'm not sure if I understood the second part, the infrared LED triggers a shot on those Pentax cameras? That's my understanding -- there's a $10 remote that can trigger the cameras, and someone had rigged an optical audio cable (I'm pretty sure that's what he called it, but I'm not sure what it is)...

I could be wrong, but it seems to me that a camera which can be controlled via wifi by a smart phone could also be controlled by wifi from a computer. 18 or 20 megapixels. The biggest downside from my perspective is that they're unlikely to run on AC, and I don't see any mention of battery life. May...

I'm curious to know what is required to implement a plugin for Spreads. Is any application with a CLI a candidate, or only applications for which one has the source available? I assume strictly GUI applications can't be plugged in, but maybe I'm mistaken. I know your documentation says your plugin c...

jbaiter wrote: Windows seems to do some stuff with the cameras in the background at all times, which prevents VirtualBox from accessing them. It does, however, correctly handle every USB device *besides* the cameras .

Probably some NSA Peepshow back door.

Based on your implied recommendation, I took a look at the Spreads documentation. It looks to me like Spreads is a wrapper for Scan Tailor, with post-Scan Tailor options for creating a variety of ebook formats. I'm currently using CHDK scripts which fire my cameras in-sync every five seconds, so a s...

Thanks for that link to Leptonica. It is very interesting, and answered a lot of questions I had. I'd kind of missed the JBIG2 move, and the discussion of it here, so that made me aware of something I should have been paying attention to. I apologize that I still haven't tried your vectorizing tool....

For the past couple of years, I've eliminated glare and reflection by eliminating the pane of glass between page and camera. I hold the pages flat with the tips of my fingers on the lower margin. I don't have to raise and lower a platen each time I turn a page. This method doesn't usually make the p...

I haven't tried your software yet, but I intend to. I have had a little experience with Clearscan, which you seem to be emulating. Clearscan appears to create a custom font which covers the range of pages you're converting (and, at least in my experience, tended to crash if you tried to convert more...

It looks good. I downloaded the Windows binary, and the PDF export is keeping pages in the correct order. Ideally, I'd like the "apply to" actions to be independent in each successive filter. I changed the "apply to" for the new "scale" filter to "everything on thi...