Scanning from thin pages

Share your software workflow. Write up your tips and tricks on how to scan, digitize, OCR, and bind ebooks.

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liklev
Posts: 4
Joined: 14 Sep 2015, 09:12
E-book readers owned: mobi, adobe de, kindle on android,moon reader
Number of books owned: 1000
Country: hungary

Scanning from thin pages

Post by liklev »

Hi,
If your book printed on thin paper (like Bible or dictionaries) and text on the backside is disturbing (visible through).
Put a matte black photo carton under the active page so the backside reflection text will disappear.
The scan will be a bit darker but no annoying text particles from the next page.
For black and white texts stored as image (not as OCR) i found adobe acrobat (the pro) made the smallest size pdf.
(have to play whit quality/size setting) clean looking invoices A4 size came around 50 to 90 kByte per page.
cday
Posts: 447
Joined: 19 Mar 2013, 14:55
Number of books owned: 0
Country: UK

Re: Scanning from thin pages

Post by cday »

liklev wrote:If your book printed on thin paper (like Bible or dictionaries) and text on the backside is disturbing (visible through).
Put a matte black photo carton under the active page so the backside reflection text will disappear.
The scan will be a bit darker but no annoying text particles from the next page.
Yes, a sheet of matte black art paper is the usually recommended material to use.

And the extent of any remaining bleed-through from the other side or darkening of the image can usually be reduced using either the scanner controls or by using a Levels adjustment in an image editor.
For black and white texts stored as image (not as OCR) i found adobe acrobat (the pro) made the smallest size pdf.
(have to play with quality/size setting) clean looking invoices A4 size came around 50 to 90 kByte per page.
The file size depends on the compression method used, which may or may not be displayed directly in the Acrobat interface. For black and white (1-bit depth) images the smallest file sizes are usually obtained with CCITT G4 'Fax' compression, or usually even smaller, JBIG2 compression.

But be aware that the lossy form of JBIG2 which produces the smallest file size can in some circumstances replace a text character by an incorrect character: a risk probably not acceptable for an invoice or engineering drawing, for example!
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