DIY Book Scanner

Absolutely seconded on Scan Tailor; it may get you better OCR results than the current book. The bleeding colour on the edges of your text pis probably making OCR worse. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with reflowable content for e-readers. That may be tricky for Kindle. However: Calibre is capable o...

Theoretically, but it's not recommended. However, since Homebrew builds are generally much faster than on Macports, it wouldn't take you long to get back up with the software you care about. If there's something that was keeping you with Macports (like software that's not in Homebrew), let me know a...

Sorry to start up a holy war here, but since I've seen several people having trouble with Macports it looked like this could use some evangelizing. So here's the pitch: for book scanning software on a Mac, you should probably be using Homebrew instead of Macports. Here's why: Homebrew is fast and li...

Seriously, Macports still hasn't fixed Qt under Lion? That's ridiculous. Scan Tailor can be built using Homebrew on Lion (and Leopard and Snow Leopard). By default it downloads a Qt SDK binary that is very speedy to install, so you can get Scan Tailor going in about 10 minutes. Installing Scan Tailo...

This is GORGEOUS, Dan. Really fantastic. I'm looking forward to this.

As always, if there's some way I can help out.

It does a visual analysis to try to pick out dark text on light background from illustrations. It's usually quite accurate, but does make mistakes.

Mixed mode will convert part of the image into pure black/white, and part of it into a greyscale or colour image with multiple shades. The advantage is that pure black/white text compresses much, much better than greyscale. If you use mixed mode, you can then use a program that will separate the two...

Well, thanks! Glad I could help. I recognize a lot of this stuff is confusing. Acrobat does a perfectly good job of doing OCR, as long as you find it's not pumping up your filesizes too much. The other option is to use an open-source OCR program plus PDFBeads to join it. The problem is that open sou...

Windows user needed - I have a test version of pdfbeads available that I need a Windows user to try out. Requirements: ImageMagick installer from here: http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/64917/RMagick-2.12.0-ImageMagick-6.5.6-8-Q8.zip Don't worry about installing the gem - I took care of that for...

rxninja, I've given you some advice in the jbig2enc thread. I think I'm going to create a Mac user omnibus thread at some point to give some more guidance. Hope, that sounds mostly good, but here's a few comments I'd make: - You don't have to use both Book Scan Wizard and Scan Tailor (though you can...