A Scanner for books with text VERY close to the gutter.

Built a scanner? Started to build a scanner? Record your progress here. Doesn't need to be a whole scanner - triggers and other parts are fine. Commercial scanners are fine too.

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Mohib
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Re: A Scanner for books with text VERY close to the gutter.

Post by Mohib »

Konos93a wrote: 07 Apr 2017, 05:26 if this thread is still active has anybody the dimensions of this design?
If you're looking for a scanner because you need to scan books with text very close to the gutter, you might want to also take a look at my single-camera scanner here:

viewtopic.php?f=14&t=3401

It uses a similar principle to this one for flattening pages (you just press the platen rather than the book to flatten the page) and achieves similar results. See below.
Binding of book with tight margin - 25%.jpg
Binding of book with tight margin - 25%.jpg (412.1 KiB) Viewed 3869 times
Scan of book in tight margin - 25%.jpg
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dpc
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Re: A Scanner for books with text VERY close to the gutter.

Post by dpc »

Konos93a wrote: 07 Apr 2017, 05:26 if this thread is still active has anybody the dimensions of this design?
The dimensions of the few pieces that make up this scanner shouldn't be too hard to determine based on your camera's focal length and the largest page size that you're planning to scan.

If you don't have access to a router or table saw to cut the dado to hold the glass plane, look for a cheap picture frame that's the correct size depending on your target page size and remove one of the long sides with a hand saw. Attach the picture frame's glass to the frame permanently using silicone sealant or epoxy. If you go this route don't use a frame that has some type of plastic/acrylic instead of a glass pane. Plastics can scratch and, due to the triboelectric effect, will more easily attract dust and small particles that will show up on your scanned photos and can confuse the OCR processor. You could always get a piece of 1/8" clear glass cut at the hardware store to fit a frame that orginally had a plastic pane so look for a picture frame that you can modify easily over what type of pane it has.

It wouldn't take much work to enable this scanner to break down into something flat that could be put into a small briefcase. I've thought about using a variant of this scanner design to scan my collection of small paperback books (my full size scanner is overkill for this). The platen frame would fold down 90 deg. toward the two arms when not in use and the entire scanner could fit into a 14" x 10" x 3" box. I would have modified the design slightly and added two horizontal arms that flipped back behind the camera mount to hold a counterweight so that the platen frame would remain up if you didn't have a hand on it. This would allow you to use both hands to turn the pages of those pesky paperbacks that want to stay closed. I'd also put some sort of bar or rubber band across the two forward arms to hold down the book's right-hand side (horizontal) pages to keep them from folding up and blocking the camera's view of the left-hand side (vertical) page.

If you do make a build of this scanner, please post photos of your work and any problems you incurred along the way so that others can benefit from your progress.
Konos93a
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Re: A Scanner for books with text VERY close to the gutter.

Post by Konos93a »

Image

done that but doesn't use that yet .i will complicate that in a week.
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