Scan Tailor is looking for a new maintainer

[ncraun]

Hello all,

I am Nate Craun and I will be taking over as Scan Tailor's new maintainer. I'm planning on merging some features from Scan Tailor extended, featured, and plus into the main Scan Tailor branch. I am also going to update the website, and switch development to github to spark up some more developer interest. Of course, I will also be responding to bug reports and feature request as posted. If you have any comments, questions, or insights about Scan Tailor going forward, please feel free to contact me.

[dtic]

Great news! Cheers for Tulon and for the new maintainer Nate.

[Tulon]

Let me just add that Nate is the guy who brought us the smoothscan tool. I feel Scan Tailor is in good hands.

[ncraun]

I've got all the code moved over to github now, and have website redesign done. The github repo is at https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor and the new site page is http://scantailor.org/

I have also set up an IRC channel, #scantailor on freenode, and a few mailing lists on Google groups. More information about these can be found on the project's contact page. Anyone who has ideas is welcome to share them in any of these places, or the DIY Book Scanner forum.

[daniel_reetz]

Nate, I just want to say how great this is. The site looks great, I've long admired your work on smoothscan, and like you, I feel that ST is really, really important. Thank you for taking on the maintenance and new development. Feels like you are already moving in the right direction.

Please feel free to join us at #diybookscanner on freenode; I'll drop into your channel as well. If there is any infrastructure, connections, donations, whatever that we can help you with, please let me know here or via email.

[Mohib]

Hi Nate,

I'm new here (my first post was yesterday about my DIY scanner), and it is very reassuring to know someone of your calibre has taken over ScanTailor. I don't think the DIY book scanning community would be practical without that software. Thank you very much for stepping up to the plate!

I know the note on this forum says no feature requests, but I'm not sure which forum here is for ST feature requests, so kindly excuse this breach of the rules.

Having used the software a few times there are a few features I think that would make it very useful. I outlined one in this post about my scanner:
http://www.diybookscanner.org/forum/vie ... 550#p17550

Another I mentioned in my scanner description on that thread, which would be the ability to drag and drop pages to correct any out of order -- as sometimes you realise too late, especially if you've done a lot of manual work on the pages (fill zones, picture zones, etc.) and you have to start over from scratch (as far as I can tell) with a new project as you can't just insert the missing page in. Here's why. Since I scan right pages first and then left pages as my scanner is a one-page-a-time scanner, sometimes during scanning a page gets missed (because the pages were stuck together during turning) and you don't know that. Then the image file numbering (to interleave left and right pages) is off by one so the pages are not interleaved correctly and so all the alternating pages after the missing one need to be jogged down one to make room for the missing one, then you need to start a new ST project because there's no way to do this jogging process in ST.

Finally, I often need to "lock" some pages from changes that I want to make to all other pages -- especially margins where some I have manually tweaked and don't want changed when I adjust the overall margins for the project and say apply to all pages. This is the same for other features (B&W mode, etc.), so for each feature the ability to lock the setting on page by page basis would be really good.

P.S. Oh yes, multi-processor support would be sublime (I have 8 CPUs I really would like to use! ).

[ncraun]

Hello Mohib, and welcome to the forums.

I think it would be best to submit your feature requests on the Github project issue tracker, at https://github.com/scantailor/scantailor/issues

The Github issue tracker serves as our todo list, and keeps track of bugs people have found, and features people want added. It's easier to have everything located in one place. I believe you will need to sign up for a Github account before you can add a new issue.

When you file the feature request, make a new request for each different thing instead of combining them into one issue. That just makes it easier to keep track of everything, when separate issues are filed separately. Also make sure no-one has already asked for the same thing. For example, I know we have feature requests for multithreading that have already been filed. If you have something to add about the request that the original filer didn't mention, you can add your thoughts as a comment on that post.

As far as the forum goes, I don't mind people discussing feature requests personally, but make sure you also add it on the Github issue tracker to make sure it doesn't get forgotten, or burried in the forums.

[dtic]

... the ability to drag and drop pages to correct any out of order -- as sometimes you realise too late, especially if you've done a lot of manual work on the pages (fill zones, picture zones, etc.) and you have to start over from scratch (as far as I can tell) with a new project as you can't just insert the missing page in. Here's why. Since I scan right pages first and then left pages as my scanner is a one-page-a-time scanner, sometimes during scanning a page gets missed (because the pages were stuck together during turning) and you don't know that. Then the image file numbering (to interleave left and right pages) is off by one so the pages are not interleaved correctly and so all the alternating pages after the missing one need to be jogged down one to make room for the missing one, then you need to start a new ST project because there's no way to do this jogging process in ST.

A workaround is to keep the pages as they are in ST and instead afterwards do batch renaming of the ST output images to get them in order. For example if your input images have the filename pattern "0001L.jpg 0001R.jpg 0002L.jpg 0002R.jpg ..." you could afterwards use a script or a renaming software like Renamer to shift up the numbering of all *R.jpg files that come after where the missing file is supposed to be.

[dtic]

Nate, I last year posted notes from compiling ST for Windows 64bit here which might be of use for the documentation. I haven't compiled since some time last summer so some components may have newer versions out.

[dbmoura]

That's fresh air. Every time this community welcome such a movement I guess the invention will spread all over.

We are with you Nate!