DIY Book Scanner

If you just need the material in a form you can move from one machine to another, then yes, just take pictures of the handwritten pages and bundle up the JPEGs or convert them into a PDF. I'd use ImageMagick to convert the JPEGs into PDFs, and PDFTK to combine the individual one-page PDFs into a sin...

For the type 2 stuff (noise incorrectly identified as content) Scan Tailor has the ability to draw exclusion zones (I forget the term Scan Tailor uses, it's been a while since I've used it) which is probably easier than editing them in GIMP and going through the autodetect again. As I recall, these ...

5 megapixels is plenty, IMO, if the aspect ratio matches the dimensions of the book and you're shooting text. I've never seen a magazine with "legal pad" dimensions, so it might not be enough for what you have in mind. I'm not keen on the watermark/registration mandates, and wouldn't pay $...

Yes, when you add a picture, it gives you the standard "browse for it" option. Just go to the directory which contains all the "L" pictures, click on the first one, scroll down, and shift-click on the last one. The only feedback you'll get is your hard drive spinning, but it will...

Okay, I got around the black keystone/content controls by using GIMP to make a white image that was the same size as my photos, adding it temporarily at the beginning of the queue, dragging the controls into the middle of my "real" pages, then deleting it. I still think the application nee...

I really like the side-by-side left and right thumbnails. The one thing that makes it unusable for me right now is that the bounding box controls are black, and so is the border around my book. I end up clawing around with my mouse in the dark, trying to find the corner control so I can drag it wher...

That https://github.com/downloads/tibob/yasw/yasw_0.2.tgz file doesn't seem to exist. I cloned the new source using GIT; I'll try to find time to compile it and provide feedback. Thanks for sharing your work.

I watched the tutorial. I think forcing a uniform width and height is a good idea, but I didn't see whether you were giving feedback on the initial image to give some assurance that the initial choice was correct. If it runs for two hours with no feedback, I might be disappointed with the end result...

My biggest problem in the past with doing L and R together is that I sometimes need to manually set content area due to either unclean / marked originals (in cases where I do not want previous readers' margin comments) or due to some kind of bad glare or background texture that causes ScanTailor to...

- If I have a rectangular chessboard (instead of square) then just need to make sure that the aspect ratio is preserved, whatever the actual L and W dimensions. I believe that's correct. - If I have to compensate for aspect ratio, then would elongate the side that has the larger DPI (so as to avoid...