DIY Book Scanner

If you are processing black and white pages, especially of plain text, then using the JBIG2 encoder instead of JPEG will create a much smaller end file size. JBIG2 is a bitonal image compression algorithm similar to djvu's cjb2. pdfbeads will automatically use JBIG2 encoding if your source images a...

Is there no way you can do the scanning yourself, maybe one of the forum members is close by and can help you our rather then sending books all over the place? I think the point was that he was far away from the UK/USA, and that shipping to his home would be expensive. Sending the books to a scanne...

When you refer to binarize are you referring to conversion of an image to 1-bit color depth (black and white) ? |'m confused because that seems to be the natural interpretation of binarize, but the cv2.jpg image posted above is 24-bit color. I believe that binarization is the conversion to 1-bit co...

I use the linux program unpaper for cleaning up and centering images. It also does deskewing, but I find that it usually fails if there's a picture among the text. So, I've been using tiff_findskew and pnmrotate for that. I've had my scripts for this for years, but it sounds like ST is a lot more co...

It seems to me that the ST output is thicker than the original, whereas the binarize strokes are about the same thickness. So, I would say that ST is doing more than just binarization. If so, it's not really a fair comparison, but if all you want is good results, it's hard to argue with what ST is o...

Are you sure the reflection is coming from the LED?

Making the light diffuse wouldn't help in this case. It might help make it more even on the book, but it wouldn't reduce reflections. It would probably make it worse because the diffuser would be much larger than the LED.

I converted a lot of my old textbooks and references into PDF files a few years ago. At the time, mathematical equations, computer code snippets and tables were very hard to put into EPUBs. So, I just left them as scanned images inside the PDF files. I also found that such a bare-bones document was ...

I've relied on flat 1/4" MDF shims with a through-hole in the center for the camera mounting bolt. I stack them up to get the height I need so that the camera is pointing at the center of the book page. With no shims, the camera is at a position that is set to the center of the smallest page s...

Wow, great post @abmartin!

As a follow up in case anyone else has a A810 quote from the CHDK forum: "ver.req method does not work on A810. If you are trying to discover firmware version to install CHDK, you can use ACID or STICK" Cheerio John I vaguely recall having the same problem with the A4000 (or thinking that...