Usability enhancements for ScanTailor

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Andrius
Posts: 5
Joined: 05 Mar 2013, 08:42
Number of books owned: 0
Country: Lithuania

Usability enhancements for ScanTailor

Post by Andrius »

Hello

I have been using SacnTailor for a while now and find it to be very good for the job.
However I have a couple of suggestions which would greatly improve this great program.
1. In Split pages section, I would appreciate ability to sort pages also by Page width - this sorting mode would greatly help to find pages that are split the wrong way
2. In Deskew section , option to sort pages by skew angle would be really useful. When processing pages with pictures ScanTailor does many mistakes when determining skew angle, and it is usually those pages which are with the biggest skew angle which are not correct. So sorting pages by skew angle would help to catch bad pages quickly.
3. Usual correct deskew angle is from -2 to 2 degrees , or even in -1..1 degree range, maybe it could be wise putting certain limits on deskew algorithm itself?
4. In Output section page sorting by content width and height would be very useful on certain books. Usually in books with pictures you want to change output mode to pages with pictures. And those pages have content width/height which is not uniform to pages with text. I can find those pages quickly in Margins section, but in Output section i have to scroll all pages one by one to find them. Sorting pages by content width/height would help find those pages quickly.
5. Probably the most difficult one: Automatic content selection algorithm has its limitations. However I've noticed few simple tricks which can help improve results. On certain books page number or page header is too close to image border and then it is not recognized as part of the page content. If I see too many pages with such problem I run my page images through image processing software (IrfanView or ImageMagick) and add border or Canvas to an image (usually in white color) so pages numbers are further away from the image edge and get recognized correctly. See image attached. If Canvas value is negative image becomes cropped and some dark page edges are stripped from the page image which is also very useful for correct automatic content recognition by ScanTailor.

I hope some of good and great ScanTailor developers could implement those features in new version of ScanTailor
Attachments
Canvas changing setting in Irfanview
Canvas changing setting in Irfanview
Canvas.png (4.29 KiB) Viewed 5516 times
Tulon
Posts: 687
Joined: 03 Oct 2009, 06:13
Number of books owned: 0
Location: London, UK
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Re: Usability enhancements for ScanTailor

Post by Tulon »

Hi Andrius,

Some of those things I don't mind having and some are relatively easy to implement, but I can't promise anything. I generally don't take feature requests and additionally I haven't been spending much time on Scan Tailor lately.
Scan Tailor experimental doesn't output 96 DPI images. It's just what your software shows when DPI information is missing. Usually what you get is input DPI times the resolution enhancement factor.
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