book ORIGINAL IMPRINT

Discussions, questions, comments, ideas, and your projects having to do with DIY Book Scanner software. This includes the Stereo Data Maker software for the cameras, post-processing software, utilities, OCR packages, and so on.

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seasalt

book ORIGINAL IMPRINT

Post by seasalt »

hello - is there a graphic or PDF edit software that can interpret an image (scan page of my book)
and tell me all the original book IMPRINT information?

example
1 border side width, border top width, border bottom width
2 fonts used and where eg times roman 12 body
3 header and footer formatting
4 sizes (x, y coordinates )
eg media box, bleed box, trim box, crop box, art box
5 table of contents format
6 section headers:lead page format
7 cover page etc...

I ask as I have many rare old books created from HTML or web page conversions and the IMPRINT is plain plain ugly. I want to rip the text and convert to original book imprint.
thankyou for your help
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rob
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Re: book ORIGINAL IMPRINT

Post by rob »

Wow! I know we've talked about scanning a book and keeping it as non-reflowable PDF. But this is ambitious! Sadly, I know of no database which contains this information, not even for out-of-copyright works. I think the best you're going to get for antiquarian books in catalogues is number of pages and size (e.g. octavo, etc).

One possibility is to look for the book at Google Books. If they have it, you might be able to just look at a few pages and extract all the info you need from there.
The Singularity is Near. ~ http://halfbakedmaker.org ~ Follow me as I build the world's first all-mechanical steam-powered computer.
seasalt

Re: book ORIGINAL IMPRINT

Post by seasalt »

thankyou - ur reply made me chuckle - i have been on this mission for over a year and still non the closer...
that was pre finding this forum

if I was to "extract the information" as you say from an image (e.g. work it out myself)
do you think it is best to bring the image into word, so word interprets style guide layout?
or another idea?
User avatar
rob
Posts: 773
Joined: 03 Jun 2009, 13:50
E-book readers owned: iRex iLiad, Kindle 2
Number of books owned: 4000
Country: United States
Location: Maryland, United States
Contact:

Re: book ORIGINAL IMPRINT

Post by rob »

Hmm, that's really hard to say. I personally use Adobe Indesign -- I've never had much luck with Word as a layout tool. I was able to duplicate the formatting of a Latin manuscript published in 1610 very easily through Indesign (I scanned the pages and made the font myself using FontForge), and it stuck very true to the original. The only issue was full justification. Clearly the algorithms used today for character and word spacing are different than whatever was manually done way back then. But it's still possible nevertheless to easily match the lines.

I should warn you about FontForge should you try it. It has the most awful interface I've ever had to use, but once you play with it for a bit, it actually works well. So be prepared to invest a few hours playing with it.
The Singularity is Near. ~ http://halfbakedmaker.org ~ Follow me as I build the world's first all-mechanical steam-powered computer.
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