Scanning

In message <20050921173653.4bd01ba4.jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> Jochen Kunz <jkunz at unixag-kl.fh-kl.de> wrote: IrfanView's "Enhance Colours" tool is very handy for converting greyscale images to B&W. Set the contrast to maximum (127), then tweak the brightness until you get something resembling readable text. Remember the settings, then use them for the rest of the scans. Freely available from <http://www.irfanview.com/> (freeware, no source code, Windows only). I used to use ImageMagick when scanning books - I loaded the image into IrfanView to find out where the "shadow" started (on both odd and even pages). Next I used IM to crop them, then convert to B&W (100% contrast, play with the brightness). Finally I used Irfanview to convert the images into G4-compressed TIFFs. I always kept the cropped (and uncropped) 8-bit greyscale images though - just in case the extra quality was required at some point. <http://www.imagemagick.org/> - open source, runs on basically anything with a C compiler. Another hint: Tumble is very handy for converting TIFFs into PDFs. <http://tumble.brouhaha.com/> - only officially works on Linux, but I've had it running on Windows too after compiling it with Mingw32. Hasn't been updated for nearly two years, but still very handy when used in conjunction with Imagemagick. Later. -- Phil. | Acorn RiscPC600 SA220 64MB+6GB 100baseT philpem at philpem.me.uk | Athlon64 3200+ A8VDeluxe R2 512MB+100GB http://www.philpem.me.uk/ | Panasonic CF-25 Mk.2 Toughbook For sale: Politician's brain. Never used.