Prizmo

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cfmorrill
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Joined: 17 Apr 2011, 21:20
Number of books owned: 0
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia

Prizmo

Post by cfmorrill »

Has anyone tried Creaceed's Prizmo lately? It looks like an interesting product...

Charles
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Prizmo

Post by daniel_reetz »

The last guy who left in a huff was a big fan of their stuff, but never said much beyond calling it "pro". I've never investigated it because I don't have a Mac or access to one. If you do try it, there's definitely room for a review here.
cfmorrill
Posts: 56
Joined: 17 Apr 2011, 21:20
Number of books owned: 0
Location: Charlottesville, Virginia

Re: Prizmo

Post by cfmorrill »

Fascinating. The software question really gets to the heart of what one is trying to do. I'm finding the big question here is are you doing books, or parts of books, or complete books that have to be done perfectly?

I have an imac and like it alot, so I'm thinking lately that I'll stay with that although I've also got a Linux machine I can use.

Right straight away, I should mention that I'm scanning books of published letters of historical figures, and the devil is in the footnotes as the type is so very small and the punctuation intense. And, there are a ton of footnotes!

One way to copy an entire book is to scan it, order the pages, run them through Scantailor, OCR them in Acrobat using the clearscan option, and be happy. The results come out B- as Scantailor is doing the best it can with tiny type and clearscan adds another layer of interpretation. The end result for plain text is fine, but if you have a page of footnotes, things get a little wonky. But hey, you're up and running with licensed software for about $130 bucks as that's the price for Acrobat 9 (still available) and Scantailor's a slick little program.

I'm scanning for another reason though, I'm trying to assemble a compendium of letters on a given subject. Thus I'm really looking at scanning four or five letters a night (and their footnotes) from piles of different volumes for about a year, and I need the output to be both searchable and attractive. Hence Prizmo is turning out to look fairly good. It works quite well, only thing is you do have to manually de-keystone, de-warp, whatever you want to call it, although it does look like you can do some batch processing as well. Am not sure, just getting into it. I bought it for $50 after playing with it for awhile this afternoon.

So what's evolving in my case is a kind of library machine with a type of software based on the idea that you want really good copies of technical/ medical/ historical texts of a few pages. It's not so much a book replicator as it is a cool kind of copy machine that converts information to a more useable, searchable form. Like I said, fascinating.
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daniel_reetz
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Joined: 03 Jun 2009, 13:56
E-book readers owned: Used to have a PRS-500
Number of books owned: 600
Country: United States
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Re: Prizmo

Post by daniel_reetz »

That's definitely the strength and weakness of this thing. It's not one machine for all people, it's many approaches to many goals. We have room for basically every approach here, commercial, simplified, whole-book, part-book... your goal determines the best path. Sounds like you are on the right one.
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