Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

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univurshul
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by univurshul »

And getting back to this post: I wanted to do a follow up and more or less educate myself on the idea of 'backgrounds' in PDF construction. there is no real intent to praise Adobe or pdftk. It's more about asking Tulon a couple questions about would-be background scenarios and the idea of background implementation on mixed mode imagery and what it can do for your eyes' longevity while ereading.
Last edited by Anonymous on 15 Nov 2010, 09:12, edited 1 time in total.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by daniel_reetz »

I just want to say that I love how we have both a nice writeup for Lightroom AND pdftk from two very impassioned and intelligent software users/experts.

There's room for both closed and open software, mostly because it's a personal choice and often a political one. I personally have a strong bias toward open source software but personally have no problems using closed source stuff until we have something better. PDFTK is pretty exceptional, the author is a member here and has emailed me personally to offer support in the past. Great stuff all around.

In the end, I am sure that we can create an all-Open and all-Free software chain that will outperform any closed thing by a wide margin. In the meantime, everything is up for discussion.
univurshul
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by univurshul »

That's great the pdftk author is a member here. I could use his expertise: I just did a test run of this software and noticed pdftk doesn't render an appropriate white background to be inverted & color changed within ereading apps of such capability. This inversion is specifically pertaining to mixed mode ScanTailor TIFF output.

dingodog,

Can you demonstrate this being done with pdftk and post some screenshots of the rendered images in an inverted ereading app? Because, I'm not seeing this possible in the pdftk software.

Thanks.
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by Tulon »

Let me give you my point of view.

You should not use Adobe Acrobat for assembling scans into PDFs. There two separate reasons for that:
1. Using a proprietary software is not a good idea in general.
2. Adobe Acrobat is just a bad tool for this kind of a job.

Now, I am going to substantiate both of my points.

Using a proprietary software is not a good idea in general.
The main problems with proprietary software are (note that being costly is not even in the list):
1. You don't control it - it controls you. If they want, they will spy on you (1, 2), they will artificially limit your hardware capabilities (3), and they will play dirty anti-competitive tricks on you (4).
2. It hinders social solidarity by forbidding you to share with your neighbour.

Adobe Acrobat is just a bad tool for this kind of a job.
The reason DjVu format caught up with the Russian book scanning community is precisely because there were no good encoders for PDF, with Adobe's own encoder not even being among the best ones. The PDF format does support almost all of the DjVu goodies, so in theory you could produce PDF files as small as DjVu ones, that is about 5MB for 300 pages with a few pictures. In practice, you aren't going to get anywhere near that with Adobe's encoder, unless you do complete OCR. I imagine Misty's PDFMaker will get you much smaller sizes compared to Adobe's encoder, at least on Mixed output of ST. Now, as far as vectorization goes, you don't really need it. You won't tell the difference between 600 DPI raster PDF and a vectorized one on normal zoom levels. Size-wise, just use a good PDF encoder and that won't be a problem.
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.
univurshul
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by univurshul »

Tulon wrote:Let me give you my point of view.

You should not use Adobe Acrobat for assembling scans into PDFs. There two separate reasons for that:
1. Using a proprietary software is not a good idea in general.
2. Adobe Acrobat is just a bad tool for this kind of a job.
I completely disagree. Here's why:

Acrobact has ClearScan OCR that cleans up binarisation; it vectorizes and reduces files sizes in precise areas while simultaneously boosting quality and resolution--which many of us are concerned about--and it does this to the point of PDF file sizes being inconsequential within today's hardware capabilities. I would call this outstanding PDF encoding, personally. Acrobat is widely available and runs great on OS X (they are a Mac original!). I think it's a superior tool for what it is designed to do. But that means a user actually needs to explore the software and test before it's labeled. Like all software, it has its weak points.

Back to the topic: -- I've done some further reading into masking overlays and have determined that for mixed mode media, some different things need to happen. It is not a ScanTailor created issue. It is an imagery editing task to pursue.

When an ST-generated TIFF shows up in Photoshop, the entire image is the background (correct, pretty basic law). So, what I want to do is replace everything white on the image as a background so that when it's loaded into an ereading app, you can select the background and text colors without altering the pictures & images--albeit color or grayscale--on the same page. (And I'm not talking ereading a full negative image, I'm talking about altering only the text/line art color and background color, leaving the pictures as is). Automating backgrounds into post-processing to allow hybrid color reading on LCD/LED displays is my ultimate goal.

And seeing how this isn't a Scan Tailor issue, I'm going to post future work on this in 'software'. Thanks for your initial input into my questions, Tulon.
Last edited by Anonymous on 15 Nov 2010, 08:34, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by StevePoling »

univurshul wrote:My father's been a software developer, running independent since 1980. He makes a living at it, a damn good one. One interesting quality about him: he doesn't knock other efforts...
One night in church a couple years back someone asked the assistant pastor, "what about so and so." If you know anything about religion, folks tend to get proprietary about heresy and orthodoxy. And get their knickers in a wad about heretics. His answer surprised me, "He's working, and I'm working, and I'd have to stop working to throw rocks at him."

I agree that commercial software companies do stuff that I disapprove of. And buy laws and develop DRM schemes I think evil. I'm a fan of open source software, because I think it's a way to get more things done and solve problems faster. But pragmatic considerations overrule ideological ones in my book. I don't think that it is practical to be a free software fundamentalist, because when you're throwing rocks at others, you aren't moving forward.
univurshul
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by univurshul »

StevePoling wrote:...commercial software companies do stuff that I disapprove of. And buy laws and develop DRM schemes I think evil.
Have you talked to your senator? Sounds like an issue for someone who can amend the U.S. Constitution.
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daniel_reetz
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Re: Output Background Color for Mixed & B/W

Post by daniel_reetz »

It has nothing to do with the Constitution, and I'd really like all this to stop, please. Everyone can use whatever software they want to use, and there doesn't need to be any pissing match about it.
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