Scanning books - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2020, 07:07:05 pm
content: When scanning books on top of aflatbedall-in-one printer/scanner, you have to flip the book around every other page.Why don't scanners have a "flip every other page" option when creating a PDF?Or are there some that do?The idea that I have to edit the PDF after annoys me.And are there any scanning apps that are good enough to scan technical stuff with? Like they'll get the grayscale stuff and graphs right?

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2020, 07:22:43 pm
content: Just change your scanning behaviourScan the left page, then shift the book so you scan the right page. A general cutting of the format afterwards is easy.

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2020, 07:36:27 pm
content: I can't, unless the top comes off. It doesn't. It moves up by about an inch, that's it.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2020, 08:09:01 pm
content: I have always scanned to image files and then edited the files before assembling into a PDF. Typically this means editing a couple files to make a set of macros to perform the same steps on all of them, which could include rotating every other file if necessary.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 14, 2020, 09:54:01 pm
content: PDFsam Basic has a tool for rotating even or odd pages. In fact it's a great tool for splitting, joining, extracting pages, merging alternate etc.Best of all, it's open source and free. I've been using it for a while ....https://pdfsam.org/

author: edy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 17, 2020, 02:44:32 pm
content: Quote from: Gyro on November 14, 2020, 09:54:01 pmI agree, I usually just scan all pages and then reshuffle the pages using an automated PDF tool in Linux (of which there are a number). PDFSam is good, but there are plenty more and scripts you can use.For example, my Automatic Document Feeder is good at feeding in pages initially but sometimes gets jammed when it tries to reverse it for double-sided scans. So to avoid jams, I just scan in all EVEN pages first (pretend it is a 1-side scan), then flip the whole pile over and rescan in all the ODD pages (which are now in reverse order). Once everything is scanned I use software to shuffle everything back to the proper order.There are a huge number of command-line Linux PDF programs (some of these are just wrappers for the toolkit):pdftkpdfjampdfseparatepdfjoinpdftopsps2pdfpoppler-utilspdfuniteThere is this command to collate pages: pdftk A=odd.pdf B=even.pdf shuffle A B output collated.pdfAnd if you happen to scan one in reverse order (flipping the pile over like I do) then you do this:pdftk A=recto.pdf B=verso.pdf shuffle A Bend-1 output collated.pdfAnother option:Just a bash quick shot using pdfjam:Build an array of input arguments:for k in $(seq 1 ${N_PAGES}); doPAGES+=(odd.pdf);PAGES+=($k);PAGES+=(even.pdf);PAGES+=($k);doneThis should allow you to use it as input list for pdfjoin:pdfjoin ${PAGES} --outfile shuffled.pdfI won't copy more examples here but basically you can find a bunch of ways to do it on this excellent page:https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/53295/how-to-merge-2-pdf-files-with-interleaving-pages-order

author: Doctorandus_P
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 22, 2020, 06:28:33 pm
content: Some 10 to 15 years ago, when computers became powerful enough book scanners were a hot topic, and in those days also a lot of diy projects got started.https://duckduckgo.com/?q=book+scanner&t=h_&iax=images&ia=imagesIf I wanted to scan more then a few books myself, I would make a "tent" like structure from two glass plates, and then drape the book over the "tent", and then use two photo camera's to make pictures of the odd and even pages.This halves the amount of manual flippin / rotation, and taking a picture is a lot quicker then waiting for a page to be scanned by a line scanner. Decent camera's these days also have enough resolution.

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 22, 2020, 07:03:50 pm
content: Quote from: Alex Eisenhut on November 14, 2020, 07:07:05 pmIf the original book is in any way dispensable, go to a print shop and have them use their large guillotine to slice off the spine, leaving you with a stack of loose pages you can dump in the ADF and scan all at once. It'll produce better output with far less effort.

author: mariush
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: November 22, 2020, 07:06:22 pm
content: With my standalone scanner, I used Irfanview to scan individual pages and automatically save them as PNG (or whatever) files, with specific file names that can contain a counter :So basically, open the scanner, press Alt+S (or the shortcut that scans the page), Irfanview receives the page and automatically saves it as png as ScanImage00001, then flip the page manually and press Alt+S again to get ScanImage00002 and so on.I'm scanning just odd pages, and then scan the even pages in another folder.Irfanview also has a batch conversion/rename feature, so I can load a whole set of even or odd pages and crop the borders and if I want to Auto Adjust Colors or reduce to Grayscale or increase contrast, whatever.Basically, rather then messing with the scanner's options to select a specific part of the page to scan, I just scan the whole surface and then do a batch crop on the whole image set.Total Commander has a Multi-Rename Tool where you can select the whole folder with ScanImage0001 , ScanImage0002 and you can specify to have the file names changed .... basically you can say Rename to "Page.png" and define C as counter, start from 1, jump by 2, 3 digits every time... so now your odd pages become:ScanImage00001.png -> Page001.pngScanImage00002.png -> Page003.pngRepeat with the "even" image set , but configure the counter to start from 2 instead of 1.At the end, you can merge the two folders and you have the whole book as consecutive png images. You can feed the images into an ocr software like Abby Fineprint or something else, or you could just use Adobe Acrobat Pro to create a big PDF out of it.With a multifunctional I'd imagine it's the same thing.... basically I'd hit scan to scan the whole set of pages on one side, the scan the other side, then use rename tool to set counters in the file names to put the files in the right order.QuoteYeah. When i don't care about the spine, I just use a ruler or one of those sharp blades to cut the pages at the spine, then simply align the pages, put the side that wasn't manually cut to the edge ... i can always batch crop the pictures to remove the "noise" on the edge.