GoldenEye 007 Nintendo 64 Community, GoldenEye X, Nintendo 64 Games Discussion

[Kerr Avon]

After hating the idea of e-book readers (to be fair, the first couple I tried were slow and not good picture quality), I've spent the last few years using them extensively and they are great, and so I'm trying to get all of my old books onto ebook format. Anyway, there are some that I can't find online, so I want to scan them in, and convert them via OCR, but many of the books won't open enough so that all of the page lies plush on the scanner, so is there any solution other than manually removing each page and scanning them that way. The books aren't valuable or anything (or even rare, it's some science fiction books, and a few books of collected essays) but I'd rather not destroy them if possible.

To clarify, the problem isn't that my (flat-bed) scaner won't scan, it's that the books themselves won't physically open enough so that the two pages both lie straight on the lense (or whatever you can the glass sheet) of the scanner. The pages curve back into the spine of the book, and so the text near the spine isn't scanned properly. I can solve this by removing each page from the book, and then scanning each individual page, but then I'm left with just the pages, and not the book anymore. This has to be a problem for lots of people when scanning books, so I was hoping that there was a solution that would not involve physically ripping the pages out of the books.

All but one of the books are paperback, and none of them have a two page size that's larger than A4.

[zoinkity]

The way it's normally done for preservation is to use a hand-held scanner. Since that probably isn't an option, you can probably get away with setting up a camera (or really good phone), maybe some lighting, and running OCR on the image. Higher the DPI the better the results usually are.

Be sure to check the results of the OCR though. The best professional OCR is ~99% accurate with English when voting is applied and font samples are regular, but factor in misprints, misreads, stray ink, etc. and you can get strange results. Had a project where all capital "F"s kept coming out as "#" and "ou" was consistently replaced with "w" due to the weird typeface.

Also, to quote an old whitepaper: "older and discolored documents must be scanned in RGB mode to capture all the image data, and to maximize OCR accuracy." In other words, black and white isn't good to use with yellowing pages.
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[Kerr Avon]

zoinkity wrote:

The way it's normally done for preservation is to use a hand-held scanner. Since that probably isn't an option, you can probably get away with setting up a camera (or really good phone), maybe some lighting, and running OCR on the image. Higher the DPI the better the results usually are. Be sure to check the results of the OCR though. The best professional OCR is ~99% accurate with English when voting is applied and font samples are regular, but factor in misprints, misreads, stray ink, etc. and you can get strange results. Had a project where all capital "F"s kept coming out as "#" and "ou" was consistently replaced with "w" due to the weird typeface. Also, to quote an old whitepaper: "older and discolored documents must be scanned in RGB mode to capture all the image data, and to maximize OCR accuracy." In other words, black and white isn't good to use with yellowing pages.

Using a camera is a great idea (as then I could make something to hold the pages open, and so not break the spine as I'd have to when scanning them on a flat-bed scanner), and I would keep the scans (the resultant jpegs) even after I'd OCRed them in case of errors that later became apparent, but I don't think it would have ever occured to me to scan any damaged black and white (or at least B&W when they were printed) pages in in colour.

None of books I wanted to scan in were damaged (other than minor damage due to age) as far as I know, but in the end I didn't bother scanning them in (I found some of them on the 'net anyway, and I have a list of others I periodically check for).

Thanks for the advice, mate - I might one day scan the rest of the books in, and if so then I'll give the camera idea a try.

[Wreck]

I took photos of some of the briefing pages from my Spanish GE guide for Sogun, to help with his translation update. I used a tripod to keep it steady. Turned out decently enough.
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