[time-nuts] OT magazine scanning

[Neon John]

On Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:35:04 -0500, John Day
<johnday at wordsnimages.com> wrote:


>>I have converted a number of manuals into pdf documents and can say that
>>it's quite a bit of work to get a really useful result.
>
>Oh don't I know it, particularly with fold-outs, I have done far too 
>many of those. That is why I am hoping to find a service to do this job.

Look in the yellow pages and see if you have a Xerox DocuTech service
center in your area.  A DocuTech can digitize pages per second full
duplex.  A major user of DocuTech services are lawyers who need to
scan thousands of evidentiary documents to put them into a litigation
database.

A DocuTech center is about the only thing I know of set up to do high
volume scanning at reasonable prices.

The other suggestion is one of the higher end PC scanners with a
document feeder.  Canon makes a nice one, as does Epson.  HP makes one
but I'd never again touch anything optical that HP makes.  The freebie
do-all program Irfanview can drive multi-page capable scanners to
produce a single PDF per magazine, for instance.

I'm not sure how useful scanned magazines are going to be to you.  The
scanning produces graphical images of the pages and not OCR'd text and
graphics (The DocuTech excepted).  You can't search for keywords and
such unless you build a separate database.

A friend of mine has been on an almost fanatical quest to digitize
every car magazine published during the muscle car era.  He's mostly
succeeded.  Many, many gigabytes.  He gave me a copy.  It's mostly
worthless since it can't be searched.  It is fun to sit down and page
through old issues of Hot Rod and the like but as a useful tool for
finding specifics, it's no good.

John
---
John De Armond
See my website for my current email address
http://www.johngsbbq.com
Cleveland, Occupied TN
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.-Ralph Waldo Emerson