DIY Book Scanner

^ Brilliant tip!

Wowzers!

So is this an alternative to line-based dewarping, a complement to it, or a replacement of it?

Thanks Daniel, very clear explanation. I picked the F/22 number out of thin air as it's what I used to use when photographing architectural models.

Anonymous, sounds awesome - got any pictures to share?

As for me, I got a little... distracted over the weekend.

@Anonymous

Shooting at F/22 (or maybe even higher) is my only plan at the moment...

Like you say, focus stacking is a bit of a conundrum with this design for obvious reasons!

Happy to see that number of face-down-scanning adepts is growing (just browsed through spamsickle's new design too ;). Your drawings look very solid and promising, good luck with building the scanner! Never thought that a good quality text page image could be recovered when scanned at 45 degrees to...

Anonymous, have you tried a black background? Some say it gives better results...

Also are you using a custom White Balance setting taken by using a full-frame picture of some blank paper under your PMMA sheet as the calibration image? If you're not, it might be a good idea to do so..?

ATX PSUs output 3.3V, 5V and 12V. You can also get 7V by shorting 12V to 5V instead of ground. Be careful, though - more modern (Pentium 4 era +) power supplys are horrendously unstable and unreliable unless you have a not-insignificant load on the 12V Line. P3-era and earlier PSUs are probably best...

Hi, rwreed, and welcome. There are many ways to turn your images into 8-bit tiffs... it might help if you told us which operating system are you using? Tesseract can do positional OCR... you might want to look here - http://code.google.com/p/tesseract-ocr/issues/detail?id=263#c10. I tried Ocropus so...

ahmad, your post inspired me to throw together something similar I've been considering for a while now. My suggestions for you would be to consider a one-piece platen, and think about lighting from the side. Here's a link to what I did -- yours will obviously be better designed, and more soundly co...

Nice work, spamsickle, and good results.

Best way to form would obviously be with a strip-heater, but failing that, a few minutes with a good heat-gun works quite well. I'm planning to mask off the flat areas with aluminium foil while heating, to get a nice clean bend. Hopefully .