Scanning / Photographing Books

**lodp** · June 7th, 2009

I'll have to digitize a number of old articles out of medium-size volumes over the coming weeks.

Since my scanner (Canon LIDE 20, A4) is incredibly slow, I tried doing it with my 6MP digital camera instead. With a little help I could do 250 pages in 30min, but I had the following problems:

* The lighting had been inadequate, resulting in large parts being unreadable when converted to a .TIF with a 1-bit black/white color index (which I have to do to reduce size of the final document). What's a good lighting setup to get results that look good when converted to black/white?

* Gwenview and digikam apparently can batch-convert files to TIF, but they can't change the color index to 1-bit-black/white. Also there's no batch-cropping. How do you do that?

* The fact that I didn't have a suitable tripod, the resulting pictures had different zoom levels, and I ended up with a stiff neck. Where do you get tripod for this kind of application?

* Holding down the pages to avoid distortions was a pain to do - I saw that professional book scanners have a sort of glass plate for that (don't know how they avoid reflections)

I would love to hear from anyone who has any experience scanning books like that.

**lensman3** · June 10th, 2009

Did you take a look at this product.

http://diy.atiz.com/

Look at the snapter product.

(I have no relation to this company, except I wish I had one of the scanners.)

Also take a look at his "http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/". I remember some scripts that would clip a tiff so that this program would convert to OCR. At the time it would only do English. Now it will do multiple languages.

**lodp** · June 10th, 2009

Snapter looks pretty sweet, a shame it's windows only. The actual scanners look nice too, prolly expensive..

Software-wise, I guess I'm stuck with gscan2pdf - at least it provides a nice GUI for cropping individual pages.

I used tesseract ocr with gscan2pdf once, it really does an amazing job (IF the quality of the document is good).

**Agno42** · June 11th, 2010

I use a digital camera on a tripod and turn the pages by hand, I manage to do this on my own and, with a desk lamp, get adequate lighting. I then print all of the photos (JPEGs) in one hit using PDF995 so they all come out in one PDF file. I use the lowest resolution on the camera but the files still come out quite large, about 160Mb for 400 pages. My next mission is to track down a program that will shrink/compress a PDF file. Cheers.

**BastardNamban** · June 15th, 2010

You need to make a scanning table.

For this, you need what's called "museum glass". Frame shops sell it. It's expensive (about 60-80 dollars for a piece a a couple feet square), but it gives no reflection from flash or ambient light.

I'd recommend making a scanning table- get a good sized piece of museum glass, mount it in a frame. Attach a couple flex-lights to the frame at either end, wide spectrum halogens to simulate natural sunlight.

Put an adjustable bracket to hold your camera over the center at an adjustable height, and then you have good illumination of a consistent quality to edit your photos. The ability to fix the camera at a set height that you can change will give the sharpest results.

All you do is turn the pages, set the whole thing on top, and the weight of the museum glass and other fixtures presses the pages consistently flat for good, reflection-free photos.

That's my suggestion, but at the very least, a plate of museum glass will make your task much easier. I've looked into this quite a bit myself, so this is all based on what I found might work best.

Hope that helps.

**tanishalinderman** · June 19th, 2010

Holding down the pages to avoid distortions was a pain to do - I saw that professional book scanners have a sort of glass plate for that (don't know how they avoid reflections)..
I'd recommend making a scanning table- get a good sized piece of museum glass, mount it in a frame. Attach a couple flex-lights to the frame at either end, wide spectrum halogens to simulate natural sunlight.

**Chronon** · June 28th, 2010

I would look into OCR if I was interested in a small final product.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/OCR

**earlycj5** · June 28th, 2010

Do you have a library nearby that perhaps has book scanners?

My university library has some that are very handy at scanning bound jounals and the like and converting them to PDF, GIF, PNG, JPG format files and saving to USB or e-mailing.