AKICIDW [*]

[piranha]

with the boat work really entering the last stages now, i'm looking at my shelves full of books, and ponder scanning them. now, i have lots of experience scanning manga, as well as scanning prose and OCRing it. but the books i most want to scan myself because there are no digital copies out there are craft books.

which are often beautifuly laid out, and that presents a problem. of course the easiest is just making a pdf from the images, but that results in enormous files, and means the text can't be be searched. i'm big on searching these days, especially when it comes to patterns.

does anyone have experience with scanning such books and recreating something similar to the original before it went to press? any suggestions for software (i prefer mac, but can deal with windows and linux)? workflow?

[* = all knowledge is contained in dreamwith]

Comments

[serene]

They do this at my job (that is, scan books of all sorts for students with visual and other disabilities) and I will ask Martha, who is in charge of that, what she recommends.

[jesse_the_k]

I have both composed (typesetter) and decomposed (Braille transcriber) such works. Sometimes the paper formats are the best possible combination: if you can use the paper books, I'd recommend moving to a different task. The craft books on my shelves have text that relies on an image in close proximity.

[juliet]

Decompose into something resembling LaTeX source format? Where pictures are put in with a label tag & a sourcefile tag (& then you'd have the actual image file saved elsewhere), & you use the label to refer to them in the text.

e.g.

blah blah blah see Figure \ref{laceknitting1}.

\label{laceknitting1}{\figure{laceknitting1.jpg}}

Sorry, that's is not accurate LaTeX source code -- I haven't written LaTeX in a while & can't be bothered looking it up, I'm afraid :) But you get the idea!

[gam0ra.blogspot.com]

Is there some reason the text can't be searched in pdfs the way you make them? I often search pdfs for text contained within them, but I know nothing about making pdfs.