A review of the YASW software written by tibob

[tkr]

I thought it would be useful to the community if I wrote a brief review of the 'YASW' application program that tibob has developed.
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... 88&p=15208
The program can be used in stand-alone mode, or as a pre-processor for Scantailor / BSW.

Why use YASW ?

While both Scantailor and BSW are good programs, I found myself getting frustrated with some of their features.
I found Scantailor's content-box and margin positioning to be its strong points. However its 'Fix Orientation', 'Split pages' and 'Deskew' steps are slow as molasses. Also having the de-warping positioned in the output stage wasn't working well for me, as I prefer to de-warp then crop.
Its been a while since I got BSW to run on my system - seemed to have a problem starting Java on my new Win7 machine, and I didn't have the smarts to figure it out. Also, I don't know any Java, and don't really have a need to learn it right now, so I cannot contribute to it.

Enter YASW (Yet Another Scan Wizard), a program written by tibob some months ago, and recently updated by him to include some features that I asked for.

What I like about it:
a) It does three things, and does them well. Rotation of images, De-warping, Cropping of pages,
b) Images are exported in jpg or PDF format, so you can use it as a pre-processor for scan-tailor, or use the images as is.
c) The program is fast, and seeing the results of the operation (rotn / dewarp/crop) is as simple as clicking a checkbox.
d) For the geeks among us, the program is very well commented, uses the Qt framework and sports a nice modular design. Rotation, Cropping and De-warping are implemented as independent filters. So adding an additional 'filter' shouldn't be too difficult. Some of the features that would be good candidates for implementation would be 'bookcrop', 'ppmunwarp' and 'deskew' - all programs that I have seen mentioned on this board.
e) Program works on both Windows and Linux and is very stable

The two features that I (and others) found to be missing in the original version have now been fixed.
- The bounding rectangle used for cropping and de-warping has now changed to a nice red colour (from black), which makes it easy to find.
- By holding down the Ctrl key, you can move the bounding box as a unit, to a different part of the page, thus allowing one to easily compensate for the situation when the book has moved slightly.

Tibob kindly made the changes that I asked for above, and I've been quite delighted with the end result. I use the program as an input to Scan-tailor, or sometimes in stand-alone form. I'm running a development build of YASW at the moment - as soon as tibob posts the code to github, I'll include a link to it here.

Since the code has been written in C++, and I've been wanting to learn Qt for some time now, I'm planning on contributing to the effort, by adding a DPI- measurement 'filter'. It would allow you to pick any two points on the image, and input a real-world measured length, and thus compute DPI, which you can use in Scantailor etc.

It's a nice piece of s/w and I encourage folks to try it out !!
TKR

[tibob]

Thank you tkr for the nice review.

As you speak from new features that were not in the old release, I relesed a new version tonight. I moved the project to sourceforge, YASW 0.3 is available there:
Project page: https://sourceforge.net/projects/yascanw/
Files: https://sourceforge.net/projects/yascanw/files/

Bug reports or feature requests can be filled into https://sourceforge.net/p/yascanw/tickets/

Robert

[murgen]

A very good soft, the best so far to prepare images for archive.org.
I appreciated a lot the control on the output size and the dewarping which provided good results even on badly distorted image.
I hope to see more update.

[allanconner144]

Thank you for a detailed review about YAWS