Speeding up the work with margins

[Benedictus]

Hi.

Along with content selection, margins is the most time consuming step in the ST workflow. I have found my way to speed up the content selection stage (by feeding ST with clean pages through aggressive levels, setting everything to manual and relinking to the original files), but the margins stage is a bottleneck in my workflow that I can't overcome.

Usually, after the content selection, I set every margin to 10 mm, line everything to the top and set the alignment to manual. Afterwards, I order the pages by height and width and start lowering the margins of the bigger pages that are forcing ST to add those soft margins that ruin everything in the output stage. This is the time consuming step.

What I'm removing is just blank space which is added when I set the margins to all pages to 10 mm. As the pages don't always have the same height and width, including the ones that theoretically would have it, we end up with 5 or 10 mm of useless white space added to our pages that makes everything smaller and more difficult to read and transforms our nice margins in way bigger margins. It is basically blank useless stuff.

In order to speed up the margins stage and fix this excess in soft margins, I would like to have in ST something that could be called the "template page". This would be a page which the user can select to define the margins for every page in the book taking into account the alignment of the pages. Smaller pages would get adjusted by soft margins just as they are now, but bigger pages would get cropped by removing any excess in soft margins that ST has placed in them.

So, for example, let's imagine that we have this page, which is not the widest nor the tallest page of the book (see those soft margins):



Then imagine that we set it up as the "template page" of our book. This would tell ST that we want this to be the largest page of our book, and it will crop every page bigger than this according to it. This will automatically do that manual and time consuming lowering of the margins that I was talking about earlier.

It will have to be done taking in account the alignment, so if we are, for example, aligning the pages to the top, ST will remove spaces from the bottom, and if we are aligning to the center it will have to remove exactly the same amount of space from both the top and the bottom of the pages. The same will happen with the right and left, as we want our pages centered. Otherwise it would be a mess.

Seeing that ST already has crop abilities, I think that this won't be hard to implement, and it will speed up a lot the work with ST.

So, what do you think? Wouldn't this be nice?

Best regards.

[dtic]

edit: I didn't see that you used Scantailor enhanced. Do you experience the same problem with the regular Scantailor?

"As the pages don't always have the same height and width, including the ones that theoretically would have it"

Can you explain what you mean? Why does pages from the same book have different dimensions?

"... useless white space added to our pages that makes everything smaller and more difficult to read and transforms our nice margins in way bigger margins. It is basically blank useless stuff."

Here are two workarounds that while not fixing what you want fixed in Scantailor might still be of use:
Try http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ to convert pdf files to remove margins and fit e-reader screens (Kindle, Nook, ...).
Use the "fit content" zoom mode in the Sumatra PDF reader for Windows to hide all margins while reading.

[Benedictus]

edit: I didn't see that you used Scantailor enhanced. Do you experience the same problem with the regular Scantailor?

"As the pages don't always have the same height and width, including the ones that theoretically would have it"

Can you explain what you mean? Why does pages from the same book have different dimensions?

Well, printed books are not perfect. Two full pages (including, header, text and footer) of a book might (and often do) have different heights. It happens in every book. Take one, select content and sort by height --> not equal.

And yes, I guess it happens also with regular ST. It's a book issue, not a ST issue.

"... useless white space added to our pages that makes everything smaller and more difficult to read and transforms our nice margins in way bigger margins. It is basically blank useless stuff."

Here are two workarounds that while not fixing what you want fixed in Scantailor might still be of use:
Try http://www.willus.com/k2pdfopt/ to convert pdf files to remove margins and fit e-reader screens (Kindle, Nook, ...).
Use the "fit content" zoom mode in the Sumatra PDF reader for Windows to hide all margins while reading.

Thanks. But this will work only for reading the books on the computer or an ebook. When printing, which is something I do a lot. The extra margins make the text smaller. That's what I was complaining about.

By the way, I've just realized how dumb I am. What I requested can be easily and quickly done with ST as it is now. This is the way to accomplish it. This works for top-aligned pages. Modify accordingly for other alignments.

1. Align everything to the top (in manual alignment mode). Tick "Match size with other pages". Apply to all pages.
2. Set your margins for top to whatever is your taste. Keep the left, right and bottom margins in 0. Apply to all pages.
3. Go to your "template page" and set your left, right and bottom margins to whatever you want. They will apply to all pages as soft margins.

Another solution would be cropping the images after the output stage with another program, but this way is easier and faster.

[Benedictus]

1. Align everything to the top (in manual alignment mode). Tick "Match size with other pages". Apply to all pages.
2. Set your margins for top to whatever is your taste. Keep the left, right and bottom margins in 0. Apply to all pages.
3. Go to your "template page" and set your left, right and bottom margins to whatever you want. They will apply to all pages as soft margins.

Just wanted to point out that this also helps in the pages where the content doesn't take the whole page (i.e. beginnings of chapters). They always end up misaligned. Now I just select all of them, align them down, set their top margins to 0 and their bottom margins to 10 (which is my bottom margin in the "template page"). It looks really good to me, and I'm a really picky person when it comes to details like this.

The only pages that require a bit of work are the covers and titles ones. I have to do them one by one looking at the physical book to figure out where the text has to be placed. The neighbour pages help on this.