20 May
2005
20 May
'05
1:29 p.m.
We've now named quite a lot of applications and
concepts about how to
handle scanned documents. I'd like to get the big picture:
- How do you scan a paper document? Page by page?
Page by page, usually. If it's bound, and two pages fit together on my
scanner, I'll often do it two pages at a time.
Do you use a script or something like that?
No...though I will use shell history mechanisms to ease the task, each
scan generally involves at least a few keystrokes.
Do you directly scan b/w, or first use
grayscale/colour and then
degrade that to b/w?
This is a judgement call. Sometimes I'll do colour, sometimes
greyscale, sometimes binary. When I do binary I'll sometimes lett he
scanner do it and sometimes I'll scan it some other way and convert it
by hand.
- How do you work on the scanned images: Do you cut
off the white rim
as much as possible?
Usually.
How do you deal with images that are a tad rotated?
Ignore the rotation, usually. Egregious cases I may rescan. In some
cases, I touch up the orientation with pnmrotate (and a subsequent
pnmcut).
How do you deal with single black dots in white
areas or the other
way around?
If the use is one for which they matter, I edit them out "by hand".
- What digital format do you like to get when it's
all finished?
Plain PDF? PDF with some bookmarks? PDF with all headings as
bookmarks? A new PDF-hyperref based index? Multiple
TIFF/PNG/whatever images? Something like a web-based slide-show?
...or multiple formats (web-based for viewing, PDF for printing,
...)?
I dislike PDF. I loathe Web-specific stuff.
I generally just keep a directory around with the iamge files.
Sometimes I'll tar it up, sometimes I'll use compression programs like
gzip or bzip2 to reduce the storage requirements.
- What do you currently use as your software:
Operating system:
NetBSD (1.4T plus a number of private hacks).
PDF viewer:
GhostScript (8.30 at the moment).
TIFF viewer:
tifftopnm, often transformed with pnm tools like pnmscale, with the
resulting p*m file displayed using a picture display program of my own.
Browser/other viewers you'd love to use:
I've yet to find really *good* such tools, probably because my
user-interface tastes are unusual.
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