Hi Paul,
Paul said:
Have you tried photographing those pages using a digital camera ?
It's too labor intensive. You have to arrange for the book
to be held open "enough", even lighting, transfer photos
to PC, convert to TIFF, trim them, import them (in the correct
order) to a PDF, etc.
A lot of time, you end up with crappy image quality "in the
binding edge" as the paper curls and you can't get a clear
view of stuff at that edge, etc.
Instead, I bring the manuals to a print shop and have them
*cut* the binding edge off of the pages. They have large,
electric stack paper cutters (do ~1000 pages at a time
*without* the inevitable skew that a manual/guillotine paper
cutter imparts to the cut!). Then, I can just feed the
"individual pages" through the document feeder (instead of
having to manually flip pages, etc.).
It ends up destroying the original *bound* document (<shrug>)
but most of the folks who look for this sort of information
would gladly see a paper document "sacrificed" if it makes
that document more readily available (in electronic form).
It's just a hugely BORING activity (tedious?) and demands
large blocks of time to get anything done. So, I don't
rush to "do more of it"! :>
This works for most "A" size manuals. Things with fold-out
pages (e.g., a B size fold-out in a "regular" manual)
have to be processed differently. I have a 12x17 scanner
for larger documents. Anything bigger than that I have to
piece together from partial scans (which gets *really*
time consuming!)
This way, the book only needs to be opened to 90 degrees, compared to
180 degrees on an ordinary flat scanner.
Even that approach won't work for a lot of materials.
E.g., the scanner in the original KRM was deliberately
designed (for obvious reasons!) to be able to scan
a book in this way. With particular care to being
able to bring the camera *deep* into the binding edge
I.e., the scanner glass came right to the edge of the
case over which the book's binding would sit (the 3rd
photo in
http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio.html is
*just* the scanner)
Yet, it still had problems with some printed materials.
"Perfect" binding sucks :>